the genetic engineering company working to bring back the woolly mammoth, has actually already brought back one of its extinct Ice Age cohabitants: the dire wolf.
The Dallas, Texas-based biotech company revealed Monday the recent successful birth of three dire wolf puppies, a major step in proving the viability of Colossal’s “de-extinction technologies” and its potential use in bringing back other species.
The birth of the dire wolf pups marks the first successfully de-extincted animal, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a press release.
“Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” Lamm said. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”
Lamm and George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, founded Colossal in 2021 with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth. Since then, the company has expanded its plans to include the de-extinction of the Australian thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and the dodo.
Last month, Colossal revealed it had genetically engineered the Woolly Mouse, which shared some coat characteristics with a woolly mammoth, including longer, lighter-colored hair with a rough, woolly texture. “This is a very, very big step for us because it proves that all of the work we’ve been doing for the last three years on the woolly mammoth is exactly what we predicted,” Lamm said at the time.
With the reveal of the dire wolf puppies, Colossal shows “that our end-to-end (de-extinction) toolkit that we talked about with the mouse works, but now it’s working with ancient DNA and it’s been pretty incredible,”
What is a dire wolf?
Many may have first heard of the dire wolf from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of fantasy novels, on which the TV show is based. (The dire wolf was the sigil, or mascot, of House Stark.) Others may be familiar with the Grateful Dead song, “Dire Wolf.”
Dire wolves have also appeared in video games including Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, tabletop game classic Dungeons & Dragons, and card game Magic the Gathering.
But the dire wolf is an actual real-world predator, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago after roaming North America for thousands of years before that, alongside saber tooth tigers and mastodons.
“Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem,” said George R.R. Martin, who is a Colossal investor and a cultural advisor, in a statement. “I get the luxury to write about magic, but Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world.”
About 25% larger than modern-day gray wolves, dire wolves had thicker, more muscular legs, more powerful shoulders, a wider head and snout with larger jaws and teeth. The dire wolf stood about 3½ feet tall and could be even longer than 6 feet and weigh up to 150 pounds.
Researchers have long been intrigued by the dire wolf because it coexisted with the gray wolf – which did not go extinct – but there hasn’t been enough dire wolf DNA found to analyze. Many dire wolf remains have been found in the La Brea tar pits, for example, but the tar pit damages the DNA, said Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer.
Shapiro and the researchers at Colossal contacted museums and laboratories with dire wolf specimens and got access to a tooth thought to be about 13,000 years old, found in Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old skull from Idaho. Inside the skull is the petrous, or inner ear bone, which is a good source of well-preserved DNA, Shapiro said.
From those two specimens, Shapiro and the team at Colossal recovered enough DNA to create two dire wolf genomes to compare with other canid species including coyotes, jackals, dholes and, of course, other wolves, Shapiro said. Using the genetic data, researchers could confirm the gray wolf as the closest living relative of the dire wolf – they share 99.5% of their DNA code.
Next, the Colossal researchers edited the gray wolf genome in 20 sites over 14 genes to express specific traits of dire wolves including a light-colored coat, hair length, coat patterning, along with body size and musculature.
Fertilized dire wolf eggs were implanted into and born by surrogate dog mothers. Two litters have led to a pair of male dire wolves, Romulus and Remus, now six months old, and Khaleesi, a female, born in January. These newcomers are not exact 100% exactly the same dire wolf that roamed the earth ages ago, but look as close to genetic experts could get.