Colossal Biosciences made headlines a few weeks ago after revealing Romulus, Remus, and Khaleese, the dire wolf puppies it engineered in a lab.
Now, if you consume as much fantasy as I do, you are probably scratching your head and thinking, “Wait a minute! Are scientists making magical creatures? Can we expect dragons to fly out of Colossal’s lab in the next few years?”
No. George R.R. Martin popularized dire wolves when A Song of Ice and Fire received its first live-action adaptation. It is only fitting that George, a Colossal Biosciences investor, would feature heavily in the company’s promotional material.
You can see him holding these adorable puppies on the internet. He reportedly nearly cried when Colossal presented the wolves to him, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, the dire wolf is House Stark’s sigil.
They have also appeared in Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and numerous other fantasy fiction properties, which may support your belief that dire wolves are fantasy. But in truth, dire wolves are real animals.
You have never seen one because they went extinct 10,000 years ago, which is why Colossal’s achievement made so many waves in the scientific community. Colossal Biosciences did not engineer a magical entity; they de-extincted an animal, or at least, many publications make that claim.
The truth is far more nuanced. Has the dire wolf returned from extinction? Unfortunately, no. Colossal’s project is not the first step in making Jurassic Park a reality. Dire wolves and grey wolves are close relatives.
Their genetic similarities allowed Colossal scientists to make 20 changes in 14 grey wolf genes. They injected the resulting embryos into female dogs. Then they performed cesarean sections to eliminate potential complications from the labour process.
Why couldn’t they inject dire wolf DNA into the embryo? Why resort to merely editing a grey wolf’s genes?
Well, according to Scientific American, Colossal scientists extracted the DNA for this project from an ancient tooth (13,000 years old) and a skull (72,000 years old). DNA that old is too degraded to create an exact copy of the original animal.
It can’t even tell scientists what the original dire wolf looked like. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are gorgeous grey wolves with dire wolf attributes; not true dire wolves. That said, they are probably closer to the original animal than what we see in fiction.
Dire wolves surfaced in 1854 when Francis A. Linck found a fragment of a dire wolf’s upper left jaw. Since then, storytellers have re-imagined the species, turning dire wolves into monstrous predators the size of small horses.
The truth is less exciting. Real dire wolves were roughly five to six feet long (head to tail). Their canines did not protrude significantly in a manner comparable to tusks, and neither were they more ferocious than modern wolves.
Regarding Colossal’s work, their results are still impressive, even though their puppies are not true dire wolves. Their technological innovations will enable the scientific community to engineer animals with traits previously found in their extinct counterparts.
The goal is for the engineered subjects to plug the hole in nature left by the extinct species. Dire wolves don’t fit that profile because the terrain they once called home is gone. Nature moved on.
Colossal is unlikely to release them from their 2000-acre reserve; not without first determining whether the animals can share the landscape with their conventional cousins without wreaking havoc.
Hopefully, Colossal Biosciences will keep pushing the envelope. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few woolly mammoths in a national park, or at least an elephant with mammoth attributes.
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