Credit: Colossal Biosciences

Earlier this week, Colossal Biosciences claimed that they’d brought the dire wolf back from extinction after some 12,000 years. They debuted photos of five-month-old Romulus and Remus, two fluffy, snow-white wolves that the company claims represent their first successful effort in “de-extincion.” The wolves, with longer, thicker, lighter-colored coats than gray wolves and a larger stature and stronger jaw, also have a younger “sister,” Khaleesi, from a different genetic line. The brothers are around 80 pounds and still growing.

The public reaction was swift and varied. Fantasy fans bitterly joked that they were seeing actual dire wolves — which featured prominently in HBO’s Game of Thrones series — before the long-awaited release of George R.R. Martin’s next novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Some of us wanted to hug the pups, while nervous Jurassic Park references abounded. A large portion of the public discourse coalesced around one specific technicality, however: Had Colossal, by making 20 edits to 14 genes in the gray wolf genome to bring it closer to the dire wolf’s genome (which they’d recently sequenced in full), actually made dire wolves? Or were Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi “designer gray wolves,” “an approximation of the direwolf,” and “transgenic gray wolves with dire wolf parts,” rather than the actual thing?

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Colossal saw this criticism coming, and chief science officer Beth Shapiro maintains that their goal to create healthy animals trumped any desire of achieving an exact replica. Further, she told Rolling Stone, a species is really just a construct, a helpful label for describing animals with similar attributes. “My colleagues in the field of taxonomy are going to be like, ‘It’s not a dire wolf,’” Shapiro previously told Rolling Stone. “And that’s fine, but to me, if it looks like a dire wolf and it acts like a dire wolf, I’m gonna call it a dire wolf.”

The scientists who spoke with Rolling Stone since the announcement side with the critics on the taxonomy question. At the same time, however, they all agreed there are more important issues to discuss regarding Colossal’s technology, including the promise of major breakthroughs in conservation efforts and serious concerns about ethics and the unintended consequences of creating new animals.

“This is about animal engineering; it’s not about resuscitating ancient species,” says evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. “The conversation is not, ‘Do we bring old species back?’ The conversation is, ‘We’re creating new kinds of creatures. We are modifying creatures in new ways. Should we be doing it?’ There’s a lot of science here that’s potentially very interesting, but given how [Colossal has] spun it, we’re not having that conversation.”

Shubin says the dire wolf project highlights concerns about introducing genetically engineered animals to the world. “Will they be able to breed? How are they going to behave? Are they going to be successful?” he says. “There’s so much we don’t know. When you start introducing things into existing ecosystems, you’re in the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes you can’t predict what happens in these complex systems when you start to tweak them.”

When Julie Meachen, who co-authored a 2021 paper on dire wolves with Shapiro, heard Colossal had created a dire wolf, her excitement gave way to trepidation. “There was part of me that was like, this is pretty darn cool that you were able to put some dire wolf into a wolf, and but then part of me was like, ‘Hoo boy,’” she says.

Meachen is a de-extinction skeptic when it comes to the unknowns of introducing a species to a new ecosystem. “Maybe we can make these animals again, and that’s cool, but what are we gonna do with them?” she says. “Where are we gonna put them? When [dire wolves] went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, the entire ecosystem went extinct: insects, plants, animals.”

These environmental elements shaped the animals who lived among them, on a biological level.

“You need its ecosystem,” says Nic Rawlence, director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at the University of Otago in New Zealand, referring to the idea of bringing back ancient species. “We know now that parasites and gut microflora are really important for health. So are these animals going to have the appropriate parasites?” Amid news that has drawn repeated comparisons to a 30-year-old sci-fi book and film franchise, Rawlence points to another legitimate concern raised by Michael Crichton on de-extinction. “In Jurassic Park, the triceratops gets sick eating plants that hadn’t evolved when it lived tens of millions of years ago,” he says. (It’s true: according to ScreenRant, the cause of illness gets glossed over in the movie, but in the book, Crichton explains that the dinosaur — a stegosaurus in print — mistakes poison berries for the small rocks it would typically eat to help it digest its food.)

Furthermore, there’s the issue of how the species will interact with humans, Earth’s apex predator of the moment. Dire wolves did overlap with early humans at the end of the Ice Age, around 11,500 years ago, but humans had barely invented agriculture at that point, let alone begun building the cities and interstate highways that would encroach upon the natural world.

Wolves, in particular, already have a rough track record with humans. In recent decades, conservationists have been working to navigate the reintroduction of gray wolves onto lands in the western United States where settlers had culled them to near-extinction, while many ranchers maintain an uneasy stance towards the endangered wolves, because they sometimes prey on their livestock. “People already have a fraught relationship with big carnivores,” Meachen says. “If we introduce even bigger carnivores, it would make everything worse.”

For now, Colossal is keeping their wolves in an expansive, 2,000-acre, fenced-in compound and carefully controlling their diet and breeding. They have no plans, they say, to truly rewild the dire wolves, although they speak broadly of goals to partner with indigenous people to release them onto indigenous lands. “These early generations will be monitored for health and behavior as we learn how they adapt to their habitats and their habitats adapt to them,” Shapiro says. “I think it is important that we focus on the intended consequences when we prepare for a future with rewilded ecosystems, whether that means de-extinct species or genetically rescued endangered species. Restoring ecological interactions makes ecosystems more robust and more resilient, with cascading benefits to every species in the community.”

The longerm captivity of engineered animals — whether they are considered new or formerly extinct — raises other questions. Meachen says she has mixed feelings about relegating species like the dire wolf to zoos or parks. “On one hand, it would provide children with wonder and could spur future generations to want to work in science and conservation,” she says. “But there are ethical questions about de-extinction: are we just creating these animals for our own pleasure? And is that OK?”

“Sometimes you can’t predict what happens in these complex systems when you start to tweak them.”

Biologist Neil Shubin

Colossal is working toward one day rewilding other currently extinct species, however, including the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, a marsupial also known as the tasmanian tiger. In these cases, Colossal says they’re evaluating risks and developing conservation assessments. “These plans involve looking at all aspects of the species extinction, their historic habitat, range, and climate, and details we know about the animal’s ecology and social biology,” chief animal officer Matt James says. “We are creating plans to find areas in today’s world where the animals can successfully thrive and then we begin working with conservationists to prepare those habitats and address potential drivers of extinction such as invasive species, societal behaviors and attitudes, and degraded habitat.”

Most of the scientists who spoke with RS said they were excited about Colossal’s advancements in genetic engineering. Their technology is already being used to boost endangered red wolf populations and to make the endangered Australian quoll resistant to the venom of the cane toad, an introduced species that has become part of the quoll’s diet — and its downfall. “Colossal is applying technology in ways that haven’t been done before,” Meachen says. “We have genetically modified plants to have traits that make them more drought-resistant or make a bigger fruit. We haven’t done much with wild animals yet.”

Other sources say Colossal’s funding — they benefit from celebrity investors from Tom Brady to Game of Thrones author Martin himself — could be put to more immediate use. “It’s hard to get conservation funding,” Rawlence says. “I think saying you’re going to go use all this money to de-extinct things is a bit disingenuous, especially around how you actually define de-extinction.” He’s eager to see what the science can do for species that are still here. “By all means, develop the technology,” he says. “But use it to conserve and save what we’ve got left.”

Ahead of Monday’s announcement, Colossal CEO Ben Lamm spoke excitedly with Rolling Stone about briefing Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on the dire wolf news and the bipartisan enthusiasm he’d encountered for Colossal’s goal of enhancing biodiversity. “I think everyone understands that if we overfish the oceans, there’s less fish,” he said at the time. “If we cut down the rainforest, there’s less habitat for those animals. People are receptive to that.”

On Monday, Burgum reacted to the news, but not in a way embraced by scientists. In an X post praising Colossal’s efforts, Burgum heralded the value of “innovation — not regulation.” He also decried the endangered species list — a roster of threatened species as defined by the Endangered Species Act and maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which falls under his Department of the Interior — as a place where species go, but 97 percent have never left. He blamed the length of those species’ endangerment on an over-emphasis on regulation.

Colossal claims Burgum’s sentiment has been taken in the wrong context. Asked to comment on the X post, Colossal replied with a quote attributed to chief animal officer James, who bottle-fed the dire wolves as babies. “I think Secretary Burgum’s quote has been unfortunately politicized, and the spirit of his message has been lost,” he said. “In our meetings with the secretary, my takeaway has been that he sees immense value in the use of innovation and technology in the recovery of endangered species.” James went on to note that “only three percent of listed species have ever been recovered to the point where they could be removed from the endangered species list,” end expressed optimism that Colossal’s tools, “in conjunction with conventional conservation,” can be used to help speed the recovery of species facing extinction, thereby getting them removed from the federal list.

Burgum’s recent social media post aside, the “spirit” of the Trump administration’s woeful conservation policies has concerned anyone who cares about the survival of our planet. As Republicans work to roll back wildlife protections, hobble the federal departments that maintain our national parks and other public lands with mass layoffs, and open more land to drilling, mining, and development, experts say we are careening ever more quickly toward irreversible environmental crisis.

Meachen was alarmed by Burgum’s post. “I worried that that was how some people would see this: now that we have this tech we don’t have to worry about endangered species lists any more,” she says. “I think that’s the absolute wrong way to be looking at it. [This technology is] not to replace species but to augment the protections we already have in place.”

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