Amidst the onslaught of breaking headlines about current affairs throughout the world, 2 weeks ago talk of de-extinction once again entered into public consciousness through three wolf pups: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. These pups are, according to the biotech company Colossal Bioscience, dire wolves, an extinct species native to the Americas from the Holocene period(125,000-10,000 years ago). Outlets were quick to run headlines such as "Dire Wolves Resurrected, the End of Endangered Species!" but upon reading the article it often seen that that's not exactly the case.
Colossal's wolves are not Dire Wolves, they are grey wolves with edited genomes. The company states that by simply editing 14 loci, the pups will grow to be as dire wolves had been, but a simple genome edit does not simply transform a species into another. Furthermore, the company's accompanying paper(which is in preprint/not reviewed as of 4/22/2025) On the ancestry and evolution of the extinct dire wolf concerns itself more with canine evolutionary history than it does with the three pups that have been all over the news. Despite this, many have began to regard the species as officially "de-extinct" and that scientists now have the ability to do the same with other species. This misrepresentation risks damaging the view of scientific ability in the eyes of the layman, as if we can de-extinct a species so easily, why not wooly mammoths or doodoos? If we can simply revive species, what need is there for environmental protections?
Sources:
https://slate.com/technology/2025/04/dire-wolf-colossal-de-extinct-conservation-science-research-paper.html
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.647074v1
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