How to make a dire wolf

Or at least, how to understand how scientists make something sort of like a dire wolf

There’s much talk on my corner of the internet about the recent news that Colossal Biosciences had brought dire wolves “back from extinction”. But have they really? Technically, the wolves are regular grey wolves that had some of their genes edited to look more like the DNA found in the original dire wolves.

Not a dire wolf. Photo by Federico Di Dio photography on Unsplash

Science Bluesky has been all over this. I can’t open the app without seeing twenty dire wolf hot takes, memes or explainers at the moment.

Here are a few:

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Interesting links

Reflection on the dire wolf news:

• Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close [gift link] By Carl Zimmer for the New York Times

• Have researchers really ‘de-extincted’ the dire wolf? No, but behind the hype was a genuine breakthrough. By Helen Pilcher for The Guardian

• ‘Return’ of the dire wolf is an impressive feat of genetic engineering, not a reversal of extinction. By Timothy Hearn for The Conversation

• What kind of future does de-extinction promise? By Sabrina Imbler for Defector

Art inspired by de-extinction:

This week’s dire wolf news brough de-extinction to the watercooler and memes again, but some people have been thinking about it for years. These three artists all made de-extinction-themed art in 2019

• Daisy Ginsberg - Resurrecting the Sublime

• Clive Smith - Speculative birds, mammals and insects on books

• Ege Kökel - Dodo in the Room

And for some biology explanation on how to make a “dire wolf”, see below

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How to make a dire wolf (or something like it)

Want your own not-really-a-dire-wolf? Just cast your mind back to the past thirty years of science headlines, from Dolly the sheep to the Human Genome Project to CRISPR-Cas9 and you have most of the steps already. Some steps are easier than others, though.

(Do not try this at home, though. Your home probably does not have the proper research equipment, safety certificates and wolf rearing facilities.)