Did They Really Resurrect the Dire Wolf? Not Exactly…

Recently the papers have been filled with news about a creature brought back to life out of ancient history. The “Dire Wolf” was an enormous canine carnivore found in the Americas from about 125,000 years ago, dying out only 10,000 years before the present day.

Firstly, let’s get some misapprehensions about this ancient creature out of the way. It was nowhere near as enormous as most people think, nothing like the huge animals seen in Game of Thrones for example. Dire wolves were about as large as American timber wolves, the largest barely reaching 70 kg or 150 lb.

What did make the dire wolf unusual was its enormous jaw and powerful bite, akin to a modern-day hyena but thought to be even stronger. This makes sense for a predator in the late Pleistocene, facing off against the giant herbivores of that era. It needed a strong bite to stand any chance of bringing down a mastodon, or a giant ground sloth.

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With the loss of these herbivores due to climate change and hunting by humans, the dire wolf also died out. But now, a new claim has been made that the dire wolf is back! A team from Colossal Biosciences has claimed that, using cloning and gene editing, they have produced three dire wolf pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi (we were rolling our eyes, too).

Is this the first successful resurrection of an extinct species? Well, not really. The puppies look cute, but these are not in any way connected to the original, American dire wolves. Nor does it seem that any actual cloning was involved. 

Cloning is a process whereby the existing genetic material is harvested from one creature, transferred into (usually) stem cells or other suitable material, and then grown into an identical copy of the original organism. This has been done before, but only with extant species, and an extinct animal has never been cloned before.

Nor have these dire wolves been cloned, they are not exact genetic copies of a long-dead dire wolves. These pups are gray wolves which have had their genes manipulated. Using genetic “references” from a 13,000 year old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000 year old dire wolf ear bone, Colossal Biosciences have modified 14 gray wolf genes to try to make these pups resemble the ancient dire wolf.

The pups, born from domestic dogs which were used as surrogate mothers, are therefore genetically modified hybrid gray wolves (Canis lupus), not dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus). They are not in any way related to the original dire wolf, which is form an entirely separate evolutionary genus. Nor are gray wolves themselves descended from dire wolves, the two separating from a shared common ancestor as much as 6 million years ago.

So what we have here are a dire wolf “inspired” creature which was made from extant wolves and domestic dogs. These dog/wolf hybrids are a genetic cosplay, an exercise in genetic engineering which appears to come from the “wouldn’t it be cool if” school of scientific research.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the headline grabbing claims and publicity of this kind never hurt anyone. But to call these dire wolves, as in the apex predator from ancient America, is untrue.

Header Image: The skeleton of an actual dire wolf from the La Brea Tar Pits, very different from whatever these new “dire wolves” are. Source: Jonathan Chen / CC BY-SA 4.0.