“Over 10,000 years ago, a howl was lost to time.”
So begins a recent promotional video by Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company, whose narrator speaks in a voice that sounds as if it, too, was resurrected from the past: a 1950s newsreel or biology-class explainer. Quick cuts of scientific B-roll — frozen blood in vials, a microscope, a white-coated hand jiggling a computer joystick — eventually give way to a lingering close-up of a wolf opening a bright, golden eye. “Today,” the voice intones, “it returns.”
The video introduces viewers to Romulus and Remus, “the first two dire wolves since the Pleistocene era.” In under three minutes, the very cute pups mature from tiny fluff balls, stumbling through their first steps, to regal youngsters romping in drifts of snow that accentuate their own (luxurious) white coats. “Roughhousing may look like play,” the narrator tells us, “but it’s serious practice for life in the pack.” The voice then shows a third, younger pup, Khaleesi — “the first female dire wolf brought back from extinction.”
Colossal brands itself “the de-extinction company” and has announced plans to bring back woolly mammoths and dodos and Tasmanian tigers, some of the biggest stars in the species extermination hall of fame. On a planet with as many as one million species at risk of disappearing, many within decades, the company is promising an undo button.
Many media outlets, including People and CNN, breathlessly promoted Colossal’s story; Time featured a cover portrait of Remus with a big red line through the word “extinct.” On my Facebook feed, clickbait link aggregators trumpeted “the world’s first de-extinction” in posts that were awe-struck and joyful. Any commenter who questioned the company’s narrative was shouted down as a hater. Amid the relentlessly grim news about the state of our planet, here was a tale of pure inspiration, of futuristic science triumphing over the tragic losses of a mythic past.
De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal’s advisers include the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show’s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.
Dire wolves thrived in the Americas for more than 200,000 years, adeptly filling so many ecological niches that their remains have been found from Alaska to Peru. More than 4,000 wolves were pulled from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles alone. They are understood to have been hunters of the many large mammals that populated the Americas before the arrival of humans dramatically changed the continents’ ecology. They then disappeared alongside their prey, among the earliest victims of what would become an ongoing crisis of human-driven extinction.
Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi began life as gray-wolf cells that were edited, grown into embryos and implanted in the wombs of surrogate dog mothers. The edits, which consisted of 20 modifications on 14 genes — a small fraction of the 19,000 genes that make up a gray-wolf genome — were based on comparisons between gray-wolf genomes and those reconstructed from dire-wolf DNA found in ancient tooth and bone fragments. (Gray wolves and dire wolves share superficially similar skeletons, which once led scientists to conclude they were closely related, but they’re actually quite distinct, with evolutionary lineages that diverged millions of years ago.) The resulting animals were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”
A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.” The scientists who specialize in canids for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group that monitors biodiversity and maintains lists of threatened and endangered species, responded to Colossal’s announcement with a news release of its own, declaring that “the three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves.” For one thing, they said, there is no way to know if these wolves are good physical proxies for animals no one has seen for 12,000 years. For another, pure physicality ignores the ecology and behavior and culture of the original dire wolf — the very things that made it one.
Even if Colossal had managed to reproduce the dire-wolf genome, that would be very different from reproducing a world in which a vanished creature might thrive. It’s also different from reproducing all the ways in which those creatures once affected their environment. Shapiro has referred to Colossal’s work as “functional de-extinction” — a concept borrowed from the rewilding movement — which argues for bringing back the animal activities that maintained an ecosystem, if not the exact animals that once performed them. It’s also a play on the ecological term “functional extinction,” which designates species that are still, technically, present in the world but in such starkly diminished numbers they no longer eat or pollinate or otherwise have a meaningful impact on their ecosystems. It’s a term that’s getting more and more play, given that the average size of global wildlife populations declined by 73 percent from 1970 to 2020.
Scientists sometimes refer to the giant ground sloths and huge camels and other extinct megafauna that dire wolves once hunted in the Americas as “ghosts,” because their presence continues to haunt the ecosystems they left behind. This can take the form, for instance, of plants that still produce large fruits, like osage oranges or papayas, that no remaining frugivores are big enough to disperse. The new wolves, which are not intended to be released into the wild, are perhaps less like Ghost, the orphaned dire-wolf character in “Game of Thrones,” and more like ghosts, haunting our world without ever really having lived in it.
Extinction is not a phenomenon of the mythic past. It’s an active and ongoing crisis, one that’s making our world less resilient and more impoverished. The potential victims, as the scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted, include many canids, the real-life extended family of dire wolves, now facing a raft of threats: “habitat loss and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, disease and the overall disruption of natural processes.” By providing the appearance of an escape clause, so-called de-extinction could undermine not just the few protections that endangered species have but also the idea that we need to make any changes at all.
The day Colossal released its promo video, Doug Burgum, the Trump administration’s secretary of the interior, wrote a long post on X celebrating the news as the first step in ending protections for endangered species. In the future, populations would never really be at risk of disappearance, no matter how diminished their presence. And if they did vanish? Well, we would just bring a few of them back, Burgum told Department of Interior employees during a town hall: “Pick your favorite species,” he said, “and call up Colossal.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Charles Carpenter/Field Museum Library, via Getty Images; Quelqun/Getty Images; MattiaATH/iStockphoto, via Getty Images; Laura Hedien/Getty Images.
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