Is the Dire Wolf Back from Extinction?

Is the Dire Wolf Back from Extinction?

Kylee French

BIOL-2110-001 - GENETICS Professor Guy F. Barbato October 19, 2025 The recent achievement by Colossal Biosciences, creating animals that carry key genes of the extinct dire wolf, is both fascinating and a little alien to me. The article "Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close", highlights how scientists are using advances in genetics to analyze ancient DNA, identify important mutations, and edit the genomes of living gray wolves to recreate traits of a long-extinct species. It’s amazing to think that humans can now use science to “bring back” characteristics of animals that disappeared thousands of years ago. This project reminds me of efforts to clone pets, showing that humans have long been trying to bring back life. At the same time, the article also raises concerns. Sometimes genetic experiments don’t always succeed, and animals can suffer negative effects, such as blindness or other health problems, when the editing goes wrong. Overall, while this work is incredibly cool, it also comes with responsibilities that cannot be ignored.

To elaborate more from the article, scientists set out to bring back traits of the extinct dire wolf using genetics. They first retrieved DNA from ancient dire wolf fossils and identified the key mutations that made dire wolves different from gray wolves. Using cells from living gray wolves, they edited 20 genes to include these dire-wolf traits and created embryos, which were implanted into surrogate dog mothers (Zimmer, 2025). This article also mentions that if it was possible they could maybe bring back other extinct animals too: "Suppose, for instance, that they recovered an intact cell from the frozen carcass of a woolly mammoth. Perhaps the cell could be thawed and used to create a mammoth clone" (Zimmer, 2025). For one, while it is relatively easy to make a single edit to the DNA of an animal, the scientists hoped to make dozens of edits. Then there was the matter of producing animals from the edited DNA. This is where many challenges arrived for them, but instead scientists pivoted to focus on the dire wolves. While the animals born are not exact copies of dire wolves, they carry the most important genetic features, marking a major step toward “de-extinction” and demonstrating the potential of modern genetic engineering.

    On a related note, this process reminds me of owners wanting to clone their pets. An article titled “Insights from One Thousand Cloned Dogs” explains how animal cloning has been pursued for two decades, with dogs being the most commonly cloned mammals. The article notes, “These observations differ between donors and their clones, and between clones from the same donor, indicating a non-genetic effect. These differences cannot be fully explained by current understandings but point to epigenetic and cellular reprogramming effects of somatic cell nuclear transfer” (Olsson, 2022). This shows that genetic cloning might not always produce the results we expect and can come with complications. For example, in the dire-wolf project, “The scientists introduced dire-wolf mutations to 15 genes. But they did not introduce the remaining five, because previous studies had shown that those five mutations cause deafness and blindness in gray wolves” (Zimmer, 2025). Overall, these examples show that while genetic engineering and cloning hold incredible potential, they also come with unpredictable outcomes and ethical considerations that scientists must carefully navigate.

References

Olsson, P.O., Jeong, Y.W., Jeong, Y. et al. Insights from one thousand cloned dogs. Sci Rep 12, 11209 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15097-7

Zimmer, C. (2025, April 7). Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close. New York Times. Retrieved October 19, 2025, from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wolf-deextinction.html

Discoveries Between Desert Relatives Gives Insight to Unique Trait Differences

The study of specific genetic traits and their utility in adaptation to specific climates has been a consistently evolving field of study. Recently, a genetic difference between the Sonoran and Mojave tortoises has been identified which might indicate the adaptational differences necessitated by each climate and how the two organisms interact distinctly with the weather differences and similarities. While the Mojave is exceedingly dry and arid, the Sonoran desert receives winter rains and summer monsoons that make temperature regulation strategies uniquely different depending on the species and their location, even when each desert is in such close proximity. By identifying these genetic differences, researching them allows us to further understand organisms commonly adapting genetically expressed strategies for survival in other climates. 

The identification of specific genes and their roles in trait expression has continued to become a more increasingly relevant topic. Genetic modification of both food and organisms opens massive new windows into dozens of genetic utilities, currently most commonly seen methods being reducing climate change and improving sustainability. By furthering the study of organisms and their unique genetic traits and expression, we can better understand how to “improve” other organisms as a whole. 

Links: 

https://news.asu.edu/20241206-science-and-technology-asu-and-uab-study-reveals-genetic-insight-desert-survival

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.17600

Dog behaviors like aggression and fearfulness are linked to breed genetics

Links :
Article : https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-breed-behavior-genetics/amp
Related Article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201910/how-much-dog-behavior-is-linked-breed-genetics%3famp


A dog’s ability to learn new tricks may be less a product of your extensive training than their underlying genetics. In a study done among 101 dog breeds, scientists recently found that certain behavioral traits such as train ability or aggression were more likely to be shared by genetically similar breeds. While others have looked into the genetic underpinnings of dog behaviors for certain breeds, this study published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in October 2019 is the first to investigate a wide variety of dog breeds and find a strong genetic signal .

Using data from over 14,000 dogs described in C-BARQ, the researchers gave each breed a score for 14 different behaviors and then searched for overall genetic similarities among breeds that had similar scores. In summary , energy level and fearfulness showed a smaller genetic contribution, about 50 percent, suggesting that differences in environment or training play an equally important role in shaping those behaviors.

This was definitely an interesting article to read . Although this study does not show how a genetic variant causes a specific behavior , it points to certain statistics that might later lead us to such. It is interesting to see how Dogs are a really powerful system to investigate the genetics of traits and diseases because generations of domestication and breeding have simplified their genomes.