My genetics students are working on presentations that they’ll give at the end of the semester. One group was very enthusiastic about discussing the idea of Pleistocene rewilding, the idea that we should resurrect extinct species and turn them loose on the Dakotas, and the most dramatic species to de-extinctify was the Wooly Mammoth. Colossal Biosciences is claiming to work on exactly that, although, honestly, I think Colossal is nothing but a hype factory.
Now, though, Colossal has announced that they have successfully resurrected on extinct species, the dire wolf. But have they, really? I don’t think so.
Modern gray wolves are not descended from dire wolves, but that’s the stock they started from. They made a piddling 20 gene edits to a mere 14 genes (that’s a bit unfair, that really is a good technical accomplishment), which is not sufficient to turn a wolf into a completely different species. What they’ve really done is made a mutant wolf and claimed it is a dire wolf.
That’s just as well, because there is no modern habitat to support a dire wolf population — if they had successfully reconstructed the full dire wolf genome, and successfully inserted that into a wolf surrogate, George Church wouldn’t be snuggling up with a cute puppy, and they wouldn’t have a place to release them, and since even modern wolves struggle to survive in the modern world, it would be a population doomed to rapid extinction. I don’t think even Canadians would be nice enough to not take them out with a hunting rifle or a trap.
Further to my argument that it’s all hype, they had to sequence more of the dire wolf genome, since what was known was inadequate, and they’re in the process of publishing that sequence. George R.R. Martin is one of the authors. You know he had nothing to do with the work, so that is just a PR stunt. The wolf puppies are spectacularly white, which was probably not true of the ancient dire wolf…they specifically deleted two pigmentation genes, a trait not present in the dire wolf genome, to get that cosmetic feature.
I asked my students who are researching the idea of Pleistocene rewilding exactly what they would do with woolly mammoths if they could resurrect them. Their answers: build a kind of glorified zoo, like Jurassic Park, but this would have to be a zoo without any ecological/environmental purpose, and I doubt that zoos have the kind of profitability that would allow them to spend tens of millions of dollars to get a single animal that would also have unknown induced genetic disorders. The fall back position was a safari game park, where billionaires could get their jollies gunning down hulking great mammoths to get a unique trophy.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that after the revolution, the billionaires will be extinct, too.
Not quite Brontoosaurs and Velociraptors, er, Deinonychus really but still. Impressive and progress!
Of course, a certain familiar question asked by the scientist character in the original JP spings to mind..
But I guess they did have to pass an ethics comittee on this one yeah?
Why don’t they have a go at engineering new animals that fit into modern ecological niches and do something useful?
How about a giant owl that breathes microplastics, eats billionaires and shits delicious cheese?
Wolves aren’t really struggling as a species. While certain populations may see decline, in Germany for example wolf populations are still growing and expanding.
We’ve got a deer overpopulation problem that could feed a lot of wolves, but the citizenry would rise up to murder the wolves with their AR-15s.
Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus, whatevs it was really a genetically engineered new creature not an actual accurate prehistoric Sauropod in any case. You can tell by the lack of feathers – on the Therapods that is not the Sauropods! ;-)
Anyhow, y’all know the one I mean right?
PS. Looks like it is eating leaves from,a Eucalypt too – I’d guess at E cladocalyx or Sugar Gum which, despite the name, may not be the sweetest choice for extinct Mesozoic era animals for chemical and leaf toughness and digestive familiarity / compatibility reasons.
I thought those were for the 30-50 feral hogs.
I realise this is just crazy talk, but how about we try and stop driving more species to extinction before we go trying to revive ones that are long gone?
Bold of you to assume that there’s going to be a revolution.
Do we even have outside confirmation that this place has actually done what they said they did? Has anyone been allowed to conduct independent DNA tests on these pups?
The only Dire that needs to be resurrected is Dire Straits.
I don’t know. I’ve quite enjoyed Mark Knopfler’s post-Dire Straits career.
@2: Simic Conclave, represent! I bet mashing Krasis together is fun as well as educational.
“I didn’t have the heart to tell them that after the revolution, the billionaires will be extinct, too.”
Don’t tease us with a good time, PZ.
Well, that’s a pity, ‘cuz a good-sized pack of dire wolves could be just the thing to drive out (or just eat) all those Republitarians in the Dakotas…
These would definitely chew my face off.
When do I pet them…?
So the point of bringing something wonderful that’s disappeared forever back to life is so that we can kill it again… Figures.
I sent PZ a link to this story last night, hoping he would bring it up. Considering the speed of his response, I’m guessing he was way ahead of me and was already writing his post. My concern about the story is this: Dire wolves are only tangentially related to modern wolves. They are a completely different lineage of canid from the grey wolves Colossal used to base the genome on. As a bunch of professional geneticists, they would have to know this already, yet they make no mention of it in their fluff pieces. This lack of transparency does not fill me with confidence in the honesty of their approach.
YouTube biologist Lindsay Nicole has been pitching Colossal’s work recently, and I hope she can distance herself from them before her reputation is irreparably tainted. I fear she might be financially tied to them though, as they have been sponsoring her channel for a while.
Correction: I don’t see that they have been sponsoring her channel, but Lindsay has been on an advisory board for Colossal for a year or more.
Perhaps the “dire wolves” could hunt the billionaires….
No!
Bad cicely!
Terminal Indigestion would be a terrible way to die.
They are a “dire maker” in the sense that Led Zeppelin feigned reggae and so many other musical styles and became well known.
They are not even changing a wolf to look like a dire wolf, they are changing it to look like the TV representation of what a fantasy book calls a dire wolf. This is beyond hype. This is a sophisticated version of the zoo that took some fluffy white dogs and painted black patches on them to look like pandas. What’s even worse: they could have used this technology to help mitigate the effects of inbreeding in endangered wild wolves (e.g. Scandinavian wolves).
genetic manipulation has consequences, dire consequences…
This is, as PZ stated, a counterfeit, commercial ploy for exposure and money and is bovine excrement. Everywhere we look we see deceitful people, liars and zealots for crackpot causes trying to get us to accept their bovine excrement.
WE (thoughtful, honest decent people) may soon be extinct. We are in dire straits. Dire wolves are a sad distraction. I hope their phony wolves grow up and rip their stupid throats out.
I fear for these three misfits. Canines are intensely social creatures and these pups have no peers to show them the ropes. They will be completely lost. Similar thing happens w/ wolf/dog hybrids. I suspect their alienation will render them dangerously neurotic & thus will be euthanized within a year or so.
The link to that MIT Technology Review article about the dire wolf story showed an ad with the tag line: “2-minute tip for a seder-free home”. Why would I want a spider-free home? Does this mean that PZ has joined the anti-spider underground?
The BBC has the same take.
dragon hunter @21: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. This is a Game of Thrones marketing hype, but the animals in GoT are just the worgs from Lord of the Rings with the name changed for copyright purposes and no orcs.
@20 — Led Zeppelin’s reggae is at least derived from actual reggae. If these “dire wolves” were on the market, they would have to be labelled “contains <0.1% dire wolf.”
The linked article suggests to me that their chief biologist is being loose with the facts. For a start, there’s this:
It is not a dire wolf, it looks like a gray wolf with minor changes, and her taxonomist friends would be well within their rights.
Uh, no. Messing around with control genes is far more dramatic than editing single genes. Editing single genes does things like change eye colour. Editing control genes does things like make eyes grow on legs, wings, or antennae. Even the idea that you can plug enhancers from one species into another and expect similar results seems fanciful to me. Most research on enhancers is done with animals with short generation times, like fruit flies, for obvious reasons. Wolf gestation is about 2 months, and then 2 years to become sexually mature. And there’s no mention of how they managed to identify or control the influence of any shadow enhancers.
So they claim to have a far better gene map of a long-extinct species (>12,000 years, cf. mammoths 4,000 years, and with no specimens preserved in permafrost) than previously compiled despite using the same resources as everyone else. And yet for some reason they opted to proceed with their genetic/cloning work and make this big PR announcement about “de-extinctioning” before they have even written up their paper on the DNA sequencing. This is not about the science, it’s about driving up the company’s value for the venture capitalists to cash out.
As a lawyer, I’m very skeptical about this “make a new Jurassic Park” thing. Remember what happened to the lawyer? (As Weird Al said in his parody song, that means the velociraptors “can’t be all bad.”)
Or, since these are wolves, they’re presumably trainable, so they could be trained to (mostly, with just a few mistakes) go after only evil lawyers. I know, I know, how could you tell? Well, the wolves would have a canid-analog olfactory awareness, so they could be smelling for “too much money,” right?
The version of Pleistocene rewilding I’ve heard was always about using existing species. There are African megafauna that could use the habitat and niches in North America that are currently unoccupied. We already brought in boars, add the things that are supposed to be hunting them.
It’s really frustrating how many sites simply parroted the company as using a “morphoogical” species concept where if something looks like the species, then it is that species. Nobody believes that version. They made it up for the occasion.
If folks are intrested in the actual animal in question here’s a good clip about the Dire Wolf (that isn’t a wolf) by Extinct Zoo on YT. A dozen minutes in length.
monad@31 — ‘using a “morphological” species concept where if something looks like the species, then it is that species’…yep, just like that ‘lion’ in that zoo.