Is it a Dire Wolf? Or a Gee Whiz Puppy?

The perils of a living PR stunt.

April 08, 2025

(As per usual: This is just my opinion. It might not be yours! I may emphasize some aspects of this, while you might emphasize others! That’s ok. It doesn’t make either of us bad people. So like, take that into account.

And yes, I’m publishing off schedule. I’m very spicy ok.)

I’ll be the first to admit those are some very cute puppies. They were all over my Bluesky timeline yesterday. White, very fluffy. Big. Their grey eyes seem to see further into the distance. Colossal Biosciences bills them as Dire Wolves—a resurrection of Aenocyon dirus. It went extinct around 10,000 years ago, a blink in evolutionary time. This is the same company that gave us woolly mice just a month ago, the first step to a massive de-extinction—the woolly mammoth.

But woolly mice aren’t woolly mammoths. And white fluffy wolfy puppies are not dire wolves. If they were dire wolves or woolly mammoths, the ethics of what they did should give us all pause. That they are not is a whole other set of ethical questions. And yet people fall for it, again and again. Because this is what science looks like, to people who know nothing about science.

Welcome to the perils of science by press release, and the hazards of genetics as startup.

An image of a wall of dire wolf skulls recovered from La Brea, backlit in glowing orange.

“But I wanted dire wolves”

Yeah, I know. And certainly The New Yorker and Time wanted to give them to you. Carl Zimmer at the New York Times was more measured.

More stories and Bluesky threads are coming out every second and I cannot possibly keep up with them all, but this is what I have gleaned:

  • Beth Shapiro, working with Colossal, isolated dire wolf DNA from a dire wolf tooth and a dire wolf skull.

  • Using that information, Colossal tweaked the genetics of 15 wolf genes, to make them more like dire wolf genes. They made them bigger, sure. Otherwise, it’s not super clear to me which genes they edited or what the results were supposed to be.

  • They also tweaked five more genes with genes present in wolves and dogs. One of the tweaks they made? To make them white. The DNA of the dire wolves suggested they were pale (though previous studies suggested they were reddish brown). But the gene that would make them white might also confer blindness and deafness. So the gene tweak Colossal used to make their “dire wolf” white? One expressed in dogs.*

  • This altered DNA was transferred to an egg cell from a dog. They made 45 eggs, developed them into embryos, inserted them into dogs. Two of them worked. One produced twin boys, the other a girl.

What we have, at best, is a set of wolf puppies with some genes that are a bit like direwolf genes, and others that are a bit like dog genes.

They are definitely cute, though.

This post is public. It is free. Share if you like. Honk if you love science.

The Wolf of Theseus

The dire wolf is called a dire wolf, yes, but it’s not a wolf. It never has been. Wolves and dire wolves split off from family Canini about 5.7 million years ago, with dire wolves developing a continent away (Shapiro thinks that actually they were the product of different, more recent interbreeding between other wolf lineages that are all extinct, but the paper on that isn’t out). Modern wolves are genus Canis, closely related to Eurasian jackals (and of course to dogs). Based on what we currently know, modern wolves are more closely related to African wild dogs and African jackals than they are to dire wolves.

Dire wolves, Aenocyon dirus, are currently thought of as remnants of a dog lineage that developed in North America (all other good pups were in Eurasia and Africa). Their skeletons are often hard to tell apart from modern wolves, but the similarities are probably a result of convergent evolution—two species evolving to look similar, because they’re making their living in similar ways.

An artist's image of a dire wolf. The animal is reddish brown with rounded ears.

I will leave most of this criticism to the genetics and paleo experts (and there are many), but 20 changes does not a new species make. These wolf puppies are wolves of Theseus, popping in new DNA planks and saying they’ve got something new. This is rather like making 20 changes to the DNA of a gorilla, it’s born a bit lanky and with red fur, and billing it as an orangutan.

Many of the stories had comments only from people involved in the project. When other scientists outside any affiliation with Colossal were included, their comments were notably tepid. They did not feel comfortable calling them dire wolves:

Adam Boyko, a geneticist at Cornell University who was not involved in the project, said, “It’s exciting that we can make functional versions of extinct species.” But he did not consider Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi to be truly resurrected dire wolves. They are not being raised in dire-wolf packs, where they could learn dire-wolf behavior, Dr. Boyko noted. And they aren’t eating an ancient diet, so they are not acquiring their ancestors’ unique suite of intestinal microbes. - The New York Times

Even Elinor Karlsson, who is on the advisory board, wasn’t thrilled about the messaging: “

I ask Beth, ‘Why are you calling this a dire wolf when it’s a gray wolf with seventeen or eighteen changes in its DNA?’ ” - New Yorker.

Science by press release

Colossal bills itself as having more than 2000 published papers from its scientists. Certainly they’ve got a lot listed. But they haven’t published a paper on the woolly mice, neither have they published a paper on the “dire” puppies. Science journalists have seen both of these animals…but TBH they could just be mice in wigs and some XL husky puppies for all we really know.**

This is science by press release, in which the company puts out statements (or in this case, invites some very lucky journalists to follow them around), claiming what they’ve done. But the papers, the actual details of what they did and how they did it, are still not out. It may be a good long while before they are.

Scientists should not be afraid of talking about their work, of course. We want to hear about it! We want to appreciate what they do! But…we also want to see what exactly it is that they did. What genes did they tweak exactly? What were the results? How are these puppies genetically and metabolically and behaviorally different from wolves?

Right now, we don’t have a lot to go on.

A living PR stunt

I am not a geneticist, or a paleontologist. I did, however, write a whole book on human-wildlife interactions. I want to focus on the thing that really gets my goat (or, perhaps, my Pleistocene extinct Caprini genus): The conservation and ecological issues.

Currently, there are three genetically tweaked wolf pups living in captivity.

What, exactly, are they FOR?

The fawning articles talk about de-extinction. This was also the selling point for the woolly mice—and eventually a woolly mammoth. The company would breed these, and put them back on the steppe, and the “mammoths,” as keystone species, would resurrect an ice age ecosystem.

But this is all supposition. The ice age ecosystem was, after all…in an ice age. Thanks to climate change, we are definitely not in one of those. Could the plants and animals that thrived in that period thrive at all in this one? Would we be dooming these animals to a second extinction?

Not only that, right now, there are only three of these wolf pups. There are no mammoths. If there were a mammoth, it would be the offspring of an Asian elephant. It would be on its own, ill-suited to life in the ecology of its parent.

“I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea,” says Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.” - Time 

The same is true, perhaps even more so, of the “dire wolves.” The animals they hunted are mostly gone. And more importantly, the areas in which they used to live are now full of people. Most dire wolf remains we have are from the La Brea asphalt seeps, which you can visit—because they’re right near downtown Los Angeles.

Right now, the puppies are given space in an undisclosed location. But what is the eventual plan? How many “dire wolves” would be produced? Where would they live?

I ask this because right now, we cannot decide where real wolves should live, let alone “dire wolves.” It was a multi-year effort, with loads of opposition, to even get wolves reintroduced to Colorado. It is already facing challenges. In Wisconsin, a single lift of the wolf hunting ban resulted in 218 dead wolves. People in cities adore wolves and see them as symbols of all that is wild and free. People in the country, who raise cattle, for example, feel very, very differently.***

And we want to breed wolves that are wolfier?! The most innocent explanation I can come up for de-extinction is that they’re making some fancy designer pets for Bezos’ Future Moon Ranch. I don’t think it’s an accident that this company has a lot of celebrity backing, and I bet many of those actors would adore a dire wolf puppy.

Dr. Meachen, who was not involved in the creation of the wolf pups, said that she had mixed feelings about the de-extinction effort.

“All the little-kid feelings in me say that I want to see what they look like,” she said. “But I have questions. We have trouble with the wolves we have today.” - The New York Times

Do it for the endangered species?

One of the things the company emphasizes is that these genetic technologies could also be used to help animals that are in danger of extinction. A good example is the red wolf in the southeastern US. There are less than 20 of them left in the wild, with nearly 300 more in breeding programs. They face a devastating genetic bottleneck.

Colossal claimed to WIRED that they have cloned four new red wolves! If that’s true, that’s wonderful news (again, they don’t seem to have published).

Of course, it didn’t make a headline. The “dire wolves” did.

People love to look at these animals because they are pretty. They are inspiring. We love to dream about the animals of the past because they are at such a huge distance from us. In our dreams, dinosaurs stomp through a jungle that didn’t exist. Mammoths roam across a steppe without overheating. In our dreams, we pet a dire wolf’s soft fur, we see them gaze into the distance with keen, wise eyes.

They love only us.

Because de-extinction efforts, in the end, are not about the species. The species are gone. They do not care. They cannot want this. De-extinction is about what we want. The animals we want to gawk at. The zoo that could have been. It’s not about the animals at all.

A white wolf lies in the snow in Canada

References

*Is this also because then they look like Jon Snow’s dire wolf in Game of Thrones? MAYBE.

**I’ll be honest I really hope they are mice in wigs because that would be hysterical.

***The company even claims they have Indigenous buy in (they have two Indigenous advisors. They have three actors from Game of Thrones as advisors too, so). As the New Yorker article quotes from CEO Ben Lamm of the Indigenous advisors: “There was this desire to bring back what they called the Great Wolf,” he claimed.

I…have significant doubts that the Great Wolf is a dire wolf to all Indigenous people. I’m not sure it is to even some. The claim feels a bit off to me, though I have only spoken with some Indigenous people about wolves, and read a bunch of books by Indigenous people about how they see wolves.

But in all my reading? The wolves they speak about are wolves. Not dire wolves. Wolves. The Great Wolf is a concept. Wolf is a spirit and a guide who has actions on a greater plane. Sometimes Wolf speaks, Wolf takes actions that affect all of humanity and all animals too. Wolf was a companion of First Man in many of the stories. But it’s never been a dire wolf.