(Image via colossal.com)

Staff Writer: Emma Bowser

Email: ebowser@umassd.edu 

Colossal Biosciences has released multiple YouTube videos on April 7, 2025, the first of which is titled “The First Direwolf Howl in Over 10,000 Years.” All of these videos are either about dire wolves or the less well known “ghost wolves” native to Texas and Louisiana.

Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) were an extremely common predator in Pleistocene America when they were alive and have been depicted numerous times in fiction. The species is perhaps the most famous for being featured in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.

Colossal says “[their] team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem,” by using de-extinction technology. However, this statement has stirred up controversy among scientists, zoo staff, and other people interested in species conservation for a number of reasons.

The announcement about their dire wolf de-extinction project was unexpected because the company previously submitted an article for peer review for their woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) de-extinction project on March 4, 2025. 

The article describes the method that Colossal intends to use for their woolly mammoth de-extinction project and functions as a proof of concept because Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) biology makes this type of experimentation difficult and “ethical considerations regarding the experimental manipulation of elephants, an endangered species with complex social structures and high cognitive capabilities, necessitate alternative approaches for functional testing.”

However, Colossal has not submitted any new articles about dire wolves for peer review, and two of the wolves have been born on October 1, 2024, with another born earlier this year on January 30. This means that the wolves are approximately 6 months and 3 months, respectively.

According to Colossal, the wolves won’t reach full maturity until they are 18+ months old. Until then, they will continue to be considered adolescents. 

While it is true that no species has been de-extinct before, the root of the issue lies with whether the dire wolves birthed by Colossal are true dire wolves and what the ethical implications of this technology are.

Colossal affirms that their wolves are dire wolves. They also claim on their website that “dire wolves, though visually similar to today’s gray wolves and jackals, had a distinct genetic lineage. Unlike with the gray wolf and jackal, which can produce hybrid offspring with related species, there is no current data showing interbreeding between dire wolves and other canids.”

However, in their videos, they say that they partially changed the genomes of gray wolves into the genomes of dire wolves. Their technique involves multiplex gene editing to edit 15 genes, and this resulted in animals that are “a little bit more dire wolf-like than gray wolf-like.”

This means that the animals that Colossal and many members of the public and press have been calling dire wolves are actually genetically modified gray wolves—or a synthetic, hybridized species that is neither fully dire wolf nor fully gray wolf.

The latest study on dire wolf genetics resulted in an article published on January 13, 2021, titled “Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage” and is available to the public for free.

The authors of that article conclude that although dire wolves and gray wolves are very similar in structure and form, “dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago.” Therefore, there is no evidence to support the argument that gray wolves and coyotes have reproduced with dire wolves, despite how common hybridization is throughout the Canidae family. 

Another important point to consider is that it’s possible that the reason gray wolves and coyotes have survived while dire wolves have not is a matter of diet. This study suggests that gray wolves and coyotes have a more flexible diet than dire wolves, which are probably specialized to hunt megafauna and thus have been unable to survive when their prey went extinct.

Regardless, the Earth and its many ecosystems have changed a lot since the Pleistocene era, and a significant number of species that would have been a common sight then are now extinct.

This leads to one of the questions that people interested in conservation ethics are constantly asking: is it ethical to revive a species whose prey has gone extinct? 

Many species have gone extinct due to human interference. One of the most famous examples is dodo birds, who were hunted to extinction. 

But most of the time, when a species is under threat of extinction today, it’s due to habitat degradation, invasive species, and disease. Studies like the 2025 State of the Birds provide evidence for this. 

Conservation and preservation efforts consequently focus on stopping those causes instead of merely addressing the symptoms. Scientists seek government aid to protect habitats from development, remove invasive species, and find better treatments and cures for diseases. 

But dire wolves were never threatened by humans. They may have faced some of the same problems that modern species face today, but it’s difficult to say why they became extinct without more information.

This dire wolf project raises a lot of concerns among those involved in the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) de-extinction project as well because there are “a lot more genetic differences that would need to be induced in a relative of a thylacine to get anywhere near this.” It requires hundreds of thousands of edits to modify a DNA sample correctly, especially because the goal is to replicate Tasmanian tiger DNA perfectly.

The current sample candidate for the Tasmanian tiger de-extinction project is the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata).