Boy, has this whole "dire wolf" think stirred up a lot of pixels in the last few days. There are a lot of photos going around the interwebs of two puppies named, appropriately, Romulus and Remus, and those puppies are adorable: Snow white, chubby, and cute.
There's a problem. Colossal Biosciences, the company that used CRISPR gene-editing technology to produce Romulus and Remus, claims to be working on "de-extinction." They aren't. One X post, not put up directly by Colossal Biosciences, showed the pups howling, claiming it is the "first dire wolf howl in 10,000 years." It's not.
The first dire wolf howl in over 10,000 years pic.twitter.com/Z4PSKdjzYI
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 7, 2025
My colleagues Bob Hoge and Brandon Morse produced a couple of great pieces on this topic, and I encourage you to read them as well:
See Also: No, Scientists Didn't Bring the Dire Wolf Back From Extinction - They Did Something Even Better
A Dire Situation? Scientists Claim to Have Brought Back Long-Extinct 'Game of Thrones' Species
But I'm here, as RedState's in-house biologist, to talk about the biology of all this - and why this isn't de-extinction at all.
First, Romulus and Remus: They aren't dire wolves. They aren't even remotely close to being dire wolves. They couldn't be close to being dire wolves, not only because dire wolves are extinct but because dire wolves were not even wolves. They belonged to a different branch of the canid family; they were not even in the same genus as the modern gray wolf. The dire wolf belonged to the genus Aenocyon - Aenocyon dirus - where the gray wolf belongs to the species Canis lupus. There is no evidence that these animals interbred, although they almost certainly co-existed. They belonged to different genera, they were probably behaviorally different, and they probably favored different prey.
We know this because we have tons of dire wolf DNA extracted mostly from the wealth of remains in the La Brea tar pits. I've visited the facility at La Brea myself, and they have uncovered the bones of hundreds of dire wolves.
Romulus and Remus are not dire wolves. They are genetically modified gray wolves. The Colossal Biosciences team used CRISPR to, in effect, duplicate what humans have done with domestic wolves - Canis lupus familiaris, or dogs - for millennia by selective breeding. They have not "de-extincted" the dire wolf. Not even close.
The same applies to most of the schemes we've seen for "de-extinction." Mammoths, for example. Take the Colossal Science page about the woolly mammoth. They make no bones (hah) about this not being a mammoth, but a gene-engineered elephant:
Colossal’s landmark de-extinction project will be the resurrection of the woolly mammoth - or more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth. It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the Mammoth’s extinction.
No, it won't be able to inhabit that ecosystem, at least, not in the wild. For one thing, the primary ecosystem in which the woolly mammoth lived, the mammoth steppe, no longer exists except in a few small, isolated pockets. For another thing, mammoths - all probiscids, for that matter - are intelligent animals with complex social behaviors, and any gene-engineered elephant bred for these cold climates will have no mature animals to, in effect, teach them about what being a mammoth is.
Any elephants modified in this manner will be nothing more than gene-engineered oddities that will live in captivity for their entire lives. The same applies to animals like the thylacine and the dodo.
With current technology, CRISPR or no CRISPR, extinction is permanent. You can't bring them back. People who have claimed that any extinct animal has been "de-extincted" are not telling the truth. It's just sensationalism and nothing more. And this claim to have brought back a "dire wolf" is particularly wrong, as the dire wolf wasn't even a member of the same genus as the animal they have genetically modified to superficially resemble a best guess at the extinct animal.
As I'm continually saying: These are facts. I wish adorable little Romulus and Remus long, healthy lives, but we should harbor no illusions about what they are or what Colossal Biosciences has achieved here. They are not dire wolves and never will be. "De-extinction" would require reassembling the entire genome, somehow assembling into chromosomes, and figuring out how to insert those chromosomes into an egg, and that technology does not exist, no matter what "Jurassic Park" fantasies people harbor about it.
