Colossal Biosciences announced the birth of three dire wolf pups it calls the world’s first “de-extinction,” claiming to have genetically engineered grey wolf embryos with traits from a predator that disappeared more than 10,000 years ago. The company branded the animals as “restored” dire wolves, but independent scientists have pushed back sharply, calling them edited grey wolves rather than true resurrections. The dispute cuts to the heart of whether gene editing can genuinely reverse extinction or whether the term itself is being stretched beyond scientific meaning.
Ancient DNA and 20 Gene Edits
Colossal’s team extracted genetic material from two ancient specimens: a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone. From those degraded samples, the company reported genome coverages of 3.4x and 12.8x, figures that represent how many times the sequencing reads overlapped across the genome. Those coverage levels are relatively low by modern standards, meaning significant gaps remain in the reconstructed dire wolf blueprint. Working with what they had, the team made 20 edits across 14 genes in grey wolf embryos, with 15 of those edits described as extinct dire wolf variants.
The scientific backstory makes the challenge clearer. A peer-reviewed study published in Nature sequenced five dire wolf genomes ranging from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years old and found that dire wolves diverged from grey wolves roughly 5.7 million years ago. The same study found no evidence of gene flow between dire wolves and North American grey wolves or coyotes. That deep evolutionary split means the two species are far more genetically distant than casual observers might assume, and bridging that gap with 20 edits leaves the vast majority of the dire wolf genome unrepresented.
Restored Wolves or Edited Grey Wolves?
Colossal has branded the pups as “restored” dire wolves, but outside scientists have assessed the animals as edited grey wolves, not genuine dire wolves brought back from the dead. The distinction matters because 20 targeted changes in a genome containing tens of thousands of genes leave the animals overwhelmingly grey wolf in their DNA. Even the University of California, whose genomics institute contributed to the work, noted that the pups are “not exact replicas” of the extinct species. Beth Shapiro, a Colossal co-founder currently on leave from UC, has acknowledged the limits of the field directly.
Shapiro has argued that scientists will never clone a perfect genetic copy of an extinct mammoth, and the same logic applies to dire wolves. Without intact cells or complete genomes, the best that gene editing can produce is a living animal that carries selected traits from a vanished species layered onto the genome of a surviving relative. That is a meaningful scientific achievement, but calling it “de-extinction” risks implying a precision that the technology does not yet deliver. No independent, peer-reviewed paper has validated Colossal’s specific edits or the resulting pup genomes; the primary public documentation remains the company’s own announcement, leaving outside experts to infer details from limited data.
Why the Framing Matters Beyond Wolves
The dire wolf announcement does not exist in isolation. Colossal has also pursued projects targeting the woolly mammoth, which vanished from the Earth roughly 4,000 years ago, and the Tasmanian tiger, or Thylacinus cynocephalus, a marsupial that was driven extinct by European colonisers. In each case, the company has framed its work as conservation technology rather than spectacle. A group of geneticists from Harvard has argued that reintroducing mammoth-like creatures to the Arctic tundra could help slow permafrost thaw, because during the late Pleistocene era, mammoths and other large animals trampled and scraped snow away from the ground, exposing the permafrost to frigid air and keeping deep layers frozen. If those ecosystem functions could be restored, the argument goes, gene-edited proxies might serve a real climate purpose.
But the gap between that vision and the current science is wide. There are broadly two paths to de-extinction: cloning from intact cells and genetic engineering of a close relative. Since no intact dire wolf or mammoth cells exist, cloning is off the table, and genetic engineering can only approximate the original animal. Beth Shapiro herself has written extensively about these constraints in her book on de-extinction, explaining why reconstruction is inherently partial, emphasizing that resurrected species will inevitably be mosaics of old and new DNA. That perspective casts Colossal’s dire wolves not as mistakes, but as prototypes of a new category: engineered proxies that may fill some ecological roles of lost species without ever being identical to them.
Ethical Stakes and Scientific Transparency
The way Colossal describes its work has ethical and policy implications that go beyond branding. If the public believes that extinction can be reversed with enough money and engineering, the urgency of protecting existing species and habitats could erode. Conservation biologists worry that promises of future de-extinction could become a moral hazard, encouraging governments and industries to tolerate higher levels of habitat destruction today on the assumption that biotechnology will fix the damage later. In that context, calling edited grey wolves “restored” dire wolves risks overselling what is currently possible and underplaying the irreplaceable loss that true extinction represents.
Transparency about methods and limitations is therefore critical. Publishing the full dire wolf pup genomes, detailing off-target edits, and submitting the work to peer review would allow independent researchers to evaluate how closely the animals match ancient DNA and what unintended changes might have occurred. Such openness would not only clarify scientific questions but also help regulators decide how to classify and oversee these organisms, whether as wildlife, livestock, or a new legal category. Until that scrutiny happens, the dire wolf pups will remain powerful symbols of de-extinction’s promise and its hype, illustrating both how far gene editing has come and how far it still has to go before the word “extinction” can be anything but final.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
