Last week, biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences announced that they were successful in bringing back the dire wolf species.
“We’ve taken a gray wolf genome, a gray wolf cell, which is already genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves because they’re very closely related,” Beth Shapiro, the chief science officer of Colossal Biosciences, said to ABC News. “And we’ve edited those cells at multiple places in its DNA sequence to contain the dire wolf version of the DNA.”
A statement by the company announced that it was the “world’s only de-extinction company,” and that their dire wolf was “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal.”
The dire wolf species has been extinct for over 12,500 years, according to their statement, which also called their innovation a “revolutionary milestone of scientific process.”
“I had all the confidence that this was going to work,” Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, told ABC News.
The dire wolf gained international fame when the species appeared in HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones, where the dire wolf was the house crest and preferred pet of the Stark family of Winterfell.
Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas, Texas is famous for its efforts to bring back other popular, extinct species such as the wooly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger.
According to the San Diego Natural History Museum, the dire wolf looked much like modern-day wolves, only heavier and with significantly larger jaws and teeth. It had relatively shorter legs, as well as larger shoulder blades and pelvic bones.
However, the dire wolf hasn’t been fully re-created.
According to Craig Stanford, biological sciences and anthropology professor at USC, the Colossal Bioscience’s dire wolf isn’t quite the real thing.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking they’ve recreated direwolves — they haven’t. They’ve created something that resembles a dire wolf,” Stanford said in an interview with Annenberg TV News on Tuesday.
“I think the technology is super cool ... but the sad fact is that elephants, for instance, are rapidly going extinct. They’re really in terrible, terrible trouble across Africa and Asia,” Stanford said. “And so maybe spending $100 billion to create one mammoth, which is going to be kind of a novelty and not really be a mammoth, is maybe not worth the investment. And I feel that way about the dire wolf thing.”
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those recreations are somehow more important than saving the biodiversity that we have today,” he said.