Wolves, Canis lupus, are magnificent animals. We have some around, a local pack of seven or eight. They generally stay back in the bush, but we hear them singing now and then. Our own domestic dogs, with whom we humans share a bond that exists nowhere else in nature, are descended from these magnificent animals.
Dire wolves, Aenocyon dirus, on the other hand, are extinct. They have been extinct for around 10,000 years now. They will always be extinct. We have thousands of preserved bones, many from the famous LaBrea tar pits, so we have a pretty good idea what they looked like and how they may have behaved. We have even recovered their DNA.
Did I mention they were extinct? They lived from 125,000 to 10,000 years ago, and they have been gone since then.
Now, fast forward to today, and a company called Colossal Biosciences claims to have de-extincted these animals. The products of their efforts are three: Romulus, Remus and a younger animal, Khaleesi. The two older ones, Romulus and Remus, are not two years old, and they are admittedly beautiful animals.
Dire wolves testing boundaries since the Ice Age. Khaleesi is the youngest and the smallest dire wolf, but that has never stopped her from chasing and bothering her older brother. But that’s exactly how it should be, right? (1/7) https://t.co/d2uHwJr9LK
— Colossal Biosciences® (@colossal) January 20, 2026
What they aren't is dire wolves. They are gray wolves, Canis lupus, with some dire wolf DNA edited into their genomes. Not dire wolves. Dire wolves are extinct.
Dire wolves and gray wolves aren't even in the same genus. Gray wolves, like our lovable companions the domestic dogs, are in genus Canis. The dire wolves were in genus Aenocyon, a genus that has no surviving members. Both animals are canids, belonging to the order Canidae, which also includes foxes, coyotes, and jackals, just to name a few. But there is no evidence that gray wolves and dire wolves ever interbred, which as they belong to two entirely different genera, we would expect. Dire wolves and gray wolves shared a common ancestor, based on DNA and biochemistry, about 5.7 million years ago.
Don't get me wrong. From a biological standpoint, what Colossal did was remarkable.
Three dire wolf pups have been born. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi arrived via surrogate dogs at a 2,000-acre ecological preserve, produced using genetic information recovered from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone, through 20 edits in 14 gray wolf genes; at six months, Romulus and Remus weighed 80 pounds and measured 4 feet long, on track for a potential 6 feet and 150 pounds.
The cloning method broke new ground. Rather than extracting tissue biopsies, Colossal isolated endothelial progenitor cells from blood, a less invasive process that co-founder George Church described as a game changer for cloning efficiency. Alongside the dire wolf work, four red wolves were cloned using ghost alleles recovered from populations along the Texas and Louisiana coast. The effort aims to restore lost genetic diversity to one of North America’s most critically endangered wolf species.
20 edits in 14 gray wolf genes. The genome of the gray wolf contains about 19,000 genes. Genetically speaking, this is a rounding error. But too many people who should know better keep calling these animals dire wolves. They aren't. Dire wolves are extinct.
Remus, shown here, and Romulus resulted from fertilized dire wolf eggs implanted into and born by surrogate dog mothers on Oct. 1, 2024. The researchers at Colossal are planning to add more dire wolves to the pack.
Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi weren't the result of "fertilized dire wolf eggs." They were fertilized gray wolf eggs, with an extremely small portion of their DNA edited with what we presume was dire wolf DNA. They are gray wolves with some minor genetic tweaks. Beautiful animals, but not dire wolves.
Here's the thing: To actually de-extinct an animal, any animal, it would take a lot more than just tweaking a few genes. One would have to have a complete genome, which we don't have. We do have some fragmented chunks of DNA, largely due to the many, many samples of dire wolf remains from the LaBrea tar pits. Some work has been done comparing what we have to extant animals' DNA, including wolves. But we don't have the full genome, and if we did, having the genome and assembling it into DNA strands is a major hurdle. Then, perhaps, a fertilized ovum could be implanted in a host animal.
But here's the other problem: Dire wolves were social animals, pack animals. Even if we were able to completely restore any extinct animal, be it a dire wolf, a mammoth, or a Tasmanian tiger, there are no adult animals around to teach it how to be a dire wolf, or a mammoth, or a Tasmanian tiger. What you would have in this case is an animal that has no way to know how to behave, and which is alone in a way no animal in history has ever been alone.
Colossal Biosciences is doing some interesting work. Genetics is the cutting edge of biology now, and their work could have broad, far-reaching implications. But these animals are not dire wolves; dire wolves are extinct. Beautiful as Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi are, we should start calling them what they are: Wolves.
Because dire wolves are extinct.
