The Dire Wolf Is Back | Hacker News Reader

The Dire Wolf Is Back

newyorker.com

189 pointsadrianhon192 comments

I think it's ethical, but I hate that it's fake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#DNA_evidence Look at this caldogram and text

> The sequences indicate the dire wolf to be a highly divergent lineage which last shared a most recent common ancestor with the wolf-like canines 5.7 million years ago. The study also measured numerous dire wolf and gray wolf skeletal samples that showed their morphologies to be highly similar, which had led to the theory that the dire wolf and the gray wolf had a close evolutionary relationship. The morphological similarity between dire wolves and gray wolves was concluded to be due to convergent evolution. Members of the wolf-like canines are known to hybridize with each other but the study could find no indication of genetic admixture from the five dire wolf samples with extant North American gray wolves and coyotes nor their common ancestor. This finding indicates that the wolf and coyote lineages evolved in isolation from the dire wolf lineage.

There are a lot of extant species that are as closely related as the wolf. Cheating based on phenotype sucks. We want real genetic diversity!

Best case, the female wolves they just just made are suitable mothers for the next round of hybrids, so they converge over time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wol...

This however disagreed with Wikipedia, and said there was some inbreeding. That helps make this less fake.

Do you mean "interbreeding?" If so, I'd like to see the actual source for that claim.

Yes I do mean interbreeding. The rest of the NYT article ought to cite the source. I can no longer read it so you better check yourself.

THe reason I asked is because I have just read several articles in more scientific sources linked here asserting that the latest genetic evidence suggests there was no interbreeding, because wolves and dires were so genetically distant.

Well, then Wikipedia 1, NYT 0, lol. I believe it!

Wikipedia does not have an opinion, and is not a source according to Wikipedia. Always use the sources the Wikipedia users to cite anything. If Wikipedia does not have a reference, don’t cite it.

I don't personally follow the reference and won't pretend otherwise != Wikipedia didn't cite anything.

Anyone can go and read the article themselves and decide if this text is credible.

The first robots were toys and wishful thinking. But look at the path that's set us down.

Be it a pale shadow or not, this is a first milestone down a path I hope we continue on.

At some point far in the future, humanity will populate an entire planet with custom designed species, something like the engineers from prometheus. If only there were a way to live long enough to see all that.

Maybe the future lightcone denizens are of masters of physics. Perhaps one day they get bored of building Dyson spheres and decide to tap into the past for amusement.

Maybe they have unimaginable access to such vast energies that they can capture every photon that ever left earth and effectively reverse the lightcone.

Maybe they can sample the neural state of every lived human with exacting precision and wholly create the history of life on earth down to every single human thought and experience. Every neurotransmitter flux. If you've conquered galaxies and bent physics, perhaps this unimaginable resolution of observation is quite trivial.

Maybe they'll resurrect us. Hopefully into a world palatable for us, not some hellscale dystopia horror/torture simulator the quadrillionaires of the future enjoy putting us through.

Maybe that's you now. Being resimulated.

This is all ludicrous, implausible, science fiction fantasy. But maybe your next waking moment will be meeting the future. Hopefully they have something good in store.

The current dystopia is no slouch.

>... humanity will...

Might*.

Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this.

Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de...

In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford cars. This does not seem like a very good argument against anything new.

Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and mammoths to work in a few years...

We'll perhaps visit them at the zoo.

Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park that wealthy and middle class people can visit.

True philantropists it seems.

(Never mind, that they never conserved anything)

"HN is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it"

I think people are conflating (fiction writer) Michael Crichton's claims of Jurassic Park being for the wealthy and well-connected with the real-world economics of a zoo.

Can you elaborate?

As people have noted in other threads: Zoos, generally, maximize revenue (and community value, which is its own ineffable thing that matters a lot... The economics of zoos aren't just in dollars and cents, they're also in the local community thinking of them as a shelter, care space, and opportunity to see exotic animals without going to another continent and not, say, an animal-prison and a blight on the community, the kind of opinions that matter when zoos need more land to operate or want to form research or educational partnerships with neighboring institutions) by being a place the public can afford to go.

As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.

Why would a zoo or something just be for wealthy people

Investors expect returns on the hundreds of millions of dollars they've invested.

At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.

They could just get the government to pay the company gobs of money for conservation efforts...

In fact, Apple has invested so much money in the iPhone. The only way they can make it work is if they sell the iPhone only to billionaires. Yes, just like Disney. The cost of Disneyland and Disneyworld mean that the only way it could provide a return is if the only people who can attend are the very wealthy. I think my model of the world is very good. It accurately describes things.

iPhones are very expensive.

If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.

Oh I see. When you meant "very expensive" you meant "easily accessible for the median American" and when that guy said "wealthy people" you interpreted that to be "the median American". It's true that Europeans and so on are quite poor but the company is in the US. Yep, factually most Africans can't go to Disneyland either.

Spot on.

If Disneyland claimed to be helping fix world problems like biodiversity loss and climate change, that would be worth criticizing as well.

Well, fortunately, the US won't be involved in fixing world problems any more now that USAID is out. Our dirty dollars shan't taint the virtuous poor any longer.

I don't know who you are or why you charge 850/hr to book but I like your brand of snark and I hope you post more often

Nah. The zoo's expenses will be pretty much fixed, regardless of number of visitors. They'll want as many visitors as possible: there's more money in selling a million cheap tickets per day than there is selling 5 expensive ones!

At worst, it'll be a very crowded zoo

Presumably those expenses will be a lot higher than a regular zoo, at least in the short/mid term.

I'd assume that translates to relatively costly ticket prices, right?

I dunno. If we assume rational, greedy owners and the costs are fixed(as in, there's a cost per animal, not a cost per visitor), the costs are pretty much irrelevant to pricing. They'll want to maximise income. The parameters that matters are how many visitors you'll get at any given price point, multiplied by that price point.

Ofc, I'm assuming Homo Economicus run this zoo, that might not be accurate irl

The business model of Colossal is to patent and sell genetic editing techniques that they prove out in their deeextinction process, for whatever that is or isn't worth.

Would you say they "spared no expense"?

Id pay to go to a zoo full of wealthy people in cages

The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number of species if and when they're in danger.

Any number of species?

Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This money and research would be better spent preventing the ecosystems from collapsing in the first place.

If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed. But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root causes of that extinction is idiocy.

Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.

Climate change is only one reason for extinctions. Humans also tend to hunt a lot of things out of existence, like the dodo, that Colossal is also trying to bring back.

Non climate hunting and direct habitat destruction is likely the largest cause of the current mass extinction event going on, life will eventually find a way to take advantage of humans like rats and pigeons already do or avoid it entirely like bats do.

> Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.

Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.

The sterile-insect technique has been practiced since the 1950s. There is nothing novel or newly promising in that regard presented here.

Are you saying that a company like Colossal has nothing to offer to the field of genetic biocontrol or are you saying there is nothing of interest in the field?

I'm saying that even if they can do it, which nothing so far suggests, then the enormous prior art in the field should still make it uninteresting to them in any case. Nothing you could patent, and it isn't charismatic to billionaires. Why bother?

Agreed, engineering our environment is hardly the worst thing. But it comes with some real risks that we shouldn't take lightly.

I'm continually disappointed they didn't decide to call it "reinstinction."

Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked.

That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.

Plus, at a certain point we should probably ask what we're even doing here. At the same time and using the same ostensible "pro-environment" framework, we:

1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl,

2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and

3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity.

If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead.

Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones!

TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...

A big reason why we should support biodiversity is that once an animal is extinct, it's practically impossible to bring it back. With small effort now we can avoid great effort later. And any ecosystem is so unbelievably complex that we just aren't yet at the point where we can predict exactly how things will adapt.

I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily predict what will happen if we go back to one.

>If we truly care about biodiversity,

The 'we' here is the issue. Who is we? The human race do not share complex holistic goals, organisational frameworks, or even aesthetic preferences. It's a miracle cooperation exists at all at transnational scale. The hope that it could serve functional purposes - rather than alternately facilitating the enrichment of the very few, and constraining the worst excesses of that wealth transfer - seems to beg the question, how?

'We' don't truly care about anything, there is no we once the net gets that wide. Don't get me started on 'should', a word that shakes its head in impotence.

I really don’t even see the point in “deextincting” animals that went extinct due to climate or geological changes. They’re not even fit for the present ecology anymore. De-extinction of species that died due to industrialization or human stress on the environment makes a lot more sense since there is, presumably, a vacant ecological niche they could be filling. Like bringing back the passenger pigeon or dodo bird, or repopulating the oceans with species that have been critically overfished. But who cares about bringing back wooly mammoths and giant sloths?

I do. I couldn't care less about passenger pigeons though. To each his own.

Because humans wiped out the mammoths, giant sloths, and a host of other megafauna. All those species survived millions of year, and numerous previous ice ages, but had no defense against human hunters. So as each area on earth was colonized by our species, the megafuana were quickly wiped out in that area.

I'm from NZ, and we had that event in our recent history. The islands had numerous species of giant birds, but these were wiped out quickly by the first humans who came here, just a few centuries ago. Same everywhere. We've been driving species to extinction for a long time.

14 isn't enough for you, though it is enough to influence looks to the point that it does look different enough, but how many genes need to be changed for it to count, for you? There's some 40 million differences between humans and chimpanzees, but only about 700 that are unique to humans.

Humans aren’t chimpanzees. For this to be a direwolf there would need to be zero differences.

Source for those numbers? Your last sentence doesn't seem to make sense.

https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...

gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions).

Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...

There may only be a smallish number of genes that are unique to humans or chimps, but obviously that is not the only source of differences between the two species. The first press release you linked states that,

> At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimpanzees and humans.

There are about 20,000 known protein-coding genes in the human genome [1], so that alone refutes the notion that there are only about 700 differences unique to humans. Besides novel unique and changes in the protein sequences themselves, changes in gene regulation is another obvious source of differences.

See this for a more thorough, and up to date, review

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...

[1] https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Info/Annotation

I think Colossal is betting on the fact that the general public will fall for sensationalism of this sort because of the low level of biology knowledge. This story makes me think Colossal is rather better at marketing than they are at genetics.

What they've created here are not actually dire wolves but a couple of timber wolves with about a dozen edits to 12 million gene pairs and the result is creatures that have phenotypic similarities to dire wolves but not their complete genetic signature.

How much of the 'gap' between species do their edits cover? Are these like 50% hybrids, or much closer to the original donor grey wolves? Is it the kind of thing that could result in more authentic (for lack of a better term) dire wolves after a few generations of breeding?

Wealthy people, huh? Well now I’m against it!

Lmao 'wealthy people bad' was definitely the substance of the critique, thank you for your valuable insight.

The main lesson from 90s movies is that we must build the torment nexus

That entire article just sounds like a collection of every naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days? Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a preexisting opposition to the idea.

Collosal would face less pushback if they were upfront about the fact that they aren't a serious attempt at solving any ecological issues but that maybe they could push the tech forward enough that someone else could use it to solve real problems.

There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that they are.

I suspect the environmental pushback is from a vocal minority which dislikes the cynical lip-service companies have found it necessary/expedient to give.

"nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now.

In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.

> a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process

Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving an endangered species or restoring one with all of its actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.

> introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing

The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact.

I personally don't care if they "really" restore an extinct animal or not (perfect clone vs. hairy elephants). Their creations are cool proofs of concept for the genetic engineering tooling that they're creating and captures public/investor imagination much more than more mundane (but monetizable) aspects of the work, like working with massive amounts of data, gene editing tools, etc.

> The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact.

In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.

The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe grasslands and promote carbon sequestration. It's difficult to sum up in a sentence but there are quite a number of articles out there on it, and it doesn't seem like the most bonkers idea I've ever heard.

And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & technology that they can spin off and sell for more mundane purposes.

> The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe grasslands and promote carbon sequestration.

Over what timescale? They don't seriously engage with this idea at all. It's total lip-service.

They should have had this character in Jurassic Park

> in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay

Perhaps they could have a coupon day?

Someone's rewatched recently :)

The only one on my side is the bloodsucking lawyer!

There's some lines from various films from my teenage years that just live in my brain rent-free

> a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"

Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.

this is basically George Church's MO. I respect him for his early work in sequencing, and he has some crazy/great ideas, but he also oversells everything to the press, which eats it up and spits out articles with the narrative "we're saving the world with this crazy idea"

Be neat if they opened a theme park on a remote island filled with de-extinct creatures.

Probably should hire more than 1 IT person, and, don't skimp on the generators and battery backups for the electric fences.

Now that is crazy talk! What do you think can possibly go wrong?

"de-extinct" is clickbait. They just used CRISPR to modify a few genes in a domestic dog

I'm unsure we want or need a real Dire Wolf, but American Alsatians have been bred for a while: https://www.marvelousdogs.com/american-alsatian/

Thank you; the opening paragraph of that article was fantastic.

> American Alsatians were first bred to create a family friendly dog breed that looks like a dire wolf. (The dire wolf is an ancient North American wolf species that became extinct around 13,000 years ago.) This dog has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf, but it is calm and gentle enough to be a great pet. They are an intelligent, loving and gentle family dog [...]

"Has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" is a great phrase, and I think highly relevant to the OP article here and the disagreement I see in the HN comments between the people who think "the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" are self-evident and those who think they're non-existent. :)

"looking like a dire wolf" is exactly what Colossol has done. They just used CRISPR to modify some genes in a dog to give it traits of the dire wolf (white hair, large size, etc)

Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it? Biological categories like species are fuzzy anyway. There is tremendous variation within each species. But where do you draw a line?

It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?

> Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it?

Only the Marketing Dept. (and some gullible-when-it-pays-to-be reporters) think they are Dire Wolves.

Yes, species/lineage/population distinctions are quite fuzzy at the level of divergence under consideration here (dire wolves vs gray wolves).

Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:

After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal’s study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome.

20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color, however:

But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem: they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that, when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat.

So the coat color alleles are NOT the dire wolf alleles.

I don't get it, so dire wolves were only 20 gene changes from gray wolves? Not thousands of tiny,crucial changes all over their respective genetic codes?

Above I'm just reporting what the New Yorker reports that Colossus has accomplished.

Reading between the lines, I take the reporting to imply that these 20 edits are what Colossus thinks is sufficient (at least for marketing purposes ;-) to recapitulate some of the key phenotypic traits of dire wolves.

Does that make them actually dire wolves? Not in my opinion.

I'd probably describe the genetically engineered pups as "isogenic with parental gray wolf genomes with the addition of 20 allelic edits that recapitulate key aspects of the dire-wolf phenotype" (or something to the effect; Colossus hasn't published anything by which to evaluate their claims).

I don't work on canids, but a quick PubMed search turns up this paper:

Perri AR, Mitchell KJ, et al. Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage. Nature. 2021 Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub 2021 Jan 13. PMID: 33442059.

The analyses in that paper suggests quite a bit deeper divergence between dire wolves and gray wolves than the New Yorker articles implies.

No. The scientists made those 20 gene changes in order to produce a gray wolf that looks like a dire wolf.

I have to agree. While this is a very cool achievement and I'm excited to see what this company does next, it seems disingenuous to claim they brought a species back from extinction. The pups are still genetically much more like modern wolves than they are dire wolves.

These aren't even concerns limited to genetic engineering. There was a good (if memory serves) Radiolab story ages ago about the conservation efforts on the Galapagos islands. The relevant part is that Lonesome George's genome died out with him, and as a result there aren't any tortoises left that can fill the fauna niche on his island of origin. But since the tortoises on other islands are closely genetically related (even given the separation between them), ecologists started a multi-generational breeding program to attempt to select the key traits of Lonesome George's strain so they can introduce a new population to the island that will do the same job his lineage did in the food web.

... which begs the question: when you're doing Bene-Gesserit-style eugenics on tortoises to get the perfect specimens, what's the nature of the nature you're trying to preserve?

Humans cannot interact with the natural world without changing it, because it is the nature of life (and human life in particular) to change things. The question isn't how we don't make an impact; it's how do we manage that impact responsibly?

(I have no idea if breeding dire-wolf-alikes with genetic modification is responsible or not. Let me know if they get out of the lab and become an invasive species, I think).

Archive.org link

https://web.archive.org/web/20250407131025/https://www.newyo...

I wish people would focus more on increasing dog lifespans instead of stuff like this. How about a Bernese Mountain Dog that lives 15+ years instead of 7 years.

Yes - but put the emphasis on healthy, productive lifespans. NOT on "prolong the suffering, for the benefit of the private-equity-owned veterinary clinic" crap.

A thing exists: https://dogagingproject.org/

https://archive.ph/Iko9w

There is an article about this in Time magazine, no paywall. https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/

Thanks, that's a terrific article

Its a horrible article. Grey wolves and dire wolves arent even genetically related in a way that allows for this sort of gene editing and we have known this for a few years now. If anything, a dire wolf is closer to a red wolf.

Yep, an absolutely empty PR grab. And seems not closer to a red wolf either, but entirely distinct from wolves as we know them. Only similar via convergent evolution.[0]

0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dire-wolves-were-...

It seems their deeper sequencing of dire wolf samples clarified the phylogeny - they claim the dire wolf's closest living relative is the gray wolf, at 99.5% identity. The 2021 study was only able to sequence the dire wolf genome at 0.23x coverage and put a 0.56 probability on their species tree (Fig 2A). https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/255832/1/NatureDireWol...

I never realised the Dire Wolf was a real historical animal, not just a fantasy one like the Owlbear.

It's not just an MtG card.

https://scryfall.com/card/ice/230/dire-wolves

Even if it weren't a real extinct animal it wouldn't have just been an MtG card

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_Wolf_(song)

Oh shit, the next instagram thing will be DnD cosplayers trying to get selfies with them.

I think Game of Thrones cosplayers would be more likely

There's a reason horses are so fast; they co-evolved in the Americas with something they had to outrun.

That seems much more likely to be cheetah-ancestors than dire wolves.

The fantasy 'dire wolf' and the real 'dire wolf' have close to zero in common, except that the real dire wolf was adapted for eating megafauna and thus had the strongest bite of all canines.

And therein lies the problem, they went extinct because their prey went extinct - unless you bring back the mammoths for them to hunt, they're never going to survive in the wild; and are essentially "a wolf with a bigger appetite" to keep captive.

There are technically a few survivors -- for instance, bison and moose.

Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?

Haven’t read full article either. But dogs have an incredibly well studied genome and are generally incredibly well understood. And due to cloning efforts, performing implantation of lab grown embryos is established protocol. Wolves are also well studied and understood, so even tho dire wolves aren’t super closely related, the dog baseline is a great control.

This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we don’t know well.

I would guess that it has to do with much more available genetic information on dogs and more existing CRISPR work with them. However, I do not know if these wolves will give us a lot of information.

That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).

I'm guessing it's a mixture of practical concerns and something that captures the imagination of investors.

My guess is that it is indeed because they're charismatic megafauna.

> Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.

The process seems to have dictated this. They needed an easy surrogate, a dog, and wolves required no need of introducing anything new into the genome, it's "just" reactivating what is already there.

Birds are more difficult to clone than mammals. I don't think we've been able to clone one yet.

I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.

Searched for this. Passenger Pigeons are the #1 species I want resurrected.

We have robust cloning protocols for dogs. For some reason dogs are really amenable to cloning.

From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :

> Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, “It’s been almost twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were established, and those culture conditions have not worked for other bird species, even ones that are really closely related, like quail.” She added that, despite the dearth of related research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-egg precursors in birds: “We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we can start doing some migration assays”—a technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of endangered birds. The team had already identified some species that could use the help.

Because Game of Thrones popularized the idea of a dire wolf as an exceedingly rare protector of children, which helps them persuade investors that there is a viable luxury market for this product. They named one “Khaleesi”, so it’s not a coincidental reference.

House of Stark will still be happy to hear their heraldic animal is back.

But yeah, clever marketing by this company.

GRRM also helped fund the project

Meanwhile, we can't even heal sinus infections. Watch the video [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyz8qS6piQY

> "He explained that I was looking at a plan for a restored ecosystem. It was also a perfectly adapted money machine. There was a large area where the ancient elephants could graze, and this would be funded, in part, by carbon-offset payments from governments and corporations. The carbon value of a single elephant is about two million dollars, he told me. (An elephant increases biodiversity, in part, by spreading seeds in its dung and by crushing dense vegetation on forest floors, giving slow-growing trees the space to survive.) He added that the interesting educational opportunities and “sexiness factor” of Colossal’s creations would make its carbon credits “trade at a premium.”"

So it's a startup, valued at 10 billion?! How exactly do they plan to make money?

Seriously, could anything be more 21st-century? Resurrecting extinct animal species (ones that supposedly went extinct naturally, mind you, not because of humans – what's the point then?) just to reintroduce them into parks and sell carbon credits.

The real prize is the technology and techniques to do this sort of stuff. CRISPR is a fascinating technology that we're just now seeing the benefits of[0]

0 - https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/crispr-technology-cure-dis...

This is a marketing gimmick and a frankly fraudulent claim. They edited a few genes in a wolf genome and called it a job well done ready for marketing. However, this is not a true recapitulation of the ancient genome of the dire wolf, rather a crude attempt at it. I’m not impressed.

Very cool, but is it ethical?

We cause lots of things to go extinct. Doesn't seem any worse.

Mad Science means never having to ask “What’s the worst that can happen?”

This is a deeply philosophical question. But it's highly dependent on the circumstances of a particular animal's extinction. Is it ethical to resurrect the Wolly Mammoth into our current climate when it's significantly warmer than the climate of the Ice Age? Likely not.

Was a species hunted to extinction? Maybe restoring that population would ease our collective conscience to some minuet degree.

So maybe bringing back some of these species is being done so as an apologetic gesture? Perhaps out of hubris?

To be fair, we're notoriously cruel to the animals that we farm for mass food production and less directly to wild animals (when human activity destroys their habitat). Images of such farm operations might remind you of conditions imposed on alleged dissedents by dictatorial regimes. You know, those same conditions that are condemned as atrocious when imposed on humans by humans. And this kind of treatment is still absolutely prevalent today on humans and other animals.

Ethically, how is it different from (say) Kentucky Kennels LLC trying to breed some Great Danes which drool less?

Hmmm, are you suggesting that the scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think whether or not they should?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0

Would it be ethical to let all this lightning striking the castle's copper spire go to waste?

Please provide the unethical case

Is it ethical to make exaggerated claims in order to raise money? No.

The article is one red flag after another.

Subscribe now to witness the rise of the Dire Wolves, step by primal step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPX4tm-J2bU

Colossal has just released a 1970s style nature documentary about the Dire Wolf pups (now quite large)

What could go wrong

Winter is coming.

So disappointed that this isn't an article about the Grateful Dead

In the timbers of fennario..

The wolves are running round

The winter was so hard and cold

Froze ten feet 'neath the ground

Don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me...

Username checks out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK948fIFYpE

I got really excited that it's about Minecraft's once popular modpack

Dire is still at it. New pack for Minecraft 1.21 updated as recently as a few weeks ago!

https://feed-the-beast.com/modpacks/126-ftb-presents-direwol...

You can even see some history/stats for all the Direwolf packs: https://feed-the-beast.com/modpacks?search=direwolf&sort=fea...

Oooooh that's crazy - I thought it was long dead! Thanks for sharing!

Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.

Meanings shift with time. The original meant that (doled out as a very harsh collective punishment by the Romans: groups of 10 would draw straws and be forced to kill the one who draw the short straw). Now it's meanining is more along the lines of 'severely reduced', where how much is 'severely' depends on the context.

indeed, this particular one though has the added complication of having part of it's meaning contained in the composition of the word.

It's usage is still changing, obviously , but for me it's a more difficult transition because of the 'deci'

I think this one is already past the past the inflection point, to be honest. I see people using the word with the new meaning far more than the old one; hell, I see people complaining about how the word is used more than I see it used for the original meaning. My take is that the original meaning is so narrow that it's almost inevitable that any more broad usage that appeared would overtake it to the point of drowning out the original.

Meanings shift quickly. Decimate was first introduced circa 1600 from Latin to mean "destroy every tenth". By 1660, it started to mean "destroy large number".

The word is from 'decimatio' which appears in original Roman histories written well before 1600.

I would say it's more that they don't know the meaning of decimated. Or they don't know the original meaning of the word. Now when someone writes that a population was decimated they probably just mean it was massively reduced. I have also seen articles saying a sports team decimated their opponent, which in that context means the winning team won by a large margin.

Semi-related: very few people, even capable professional writers, use "disinterested" correctly.

Can you provide an example? I'm not sure how one would use it improperly...

The short answer is that disinterested means unbiased, having no conflicts of interest, impartial. So a judge in a court should be disinterested, but not uninterested.

It is often erroneously used when the writer means uninterested.

Using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has become more common over the past few decades, rather than using it in the older sense of "having no stake in the outcome, having no bias or partiality with respect to a conflict."

An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested" in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.

Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it doesn't really make sense to me that there would be some inherent meaning that overrides that. Language evolving isn't a new thing, and once a meaning reaches enough mindshare, there's no turning back.

Language changes, sure, but only because people change language. The changes, and lack of them, are always the result of an ongoing negotiation and evolving consensus as to what words should mean and how they should be used.

Sometimes prescriptivism is pretentious nonsense (like hypercorrection), status-seeking bullshit, or bullying masquerading as erudition, but sometimes it's just an explicit contribution to that ongoing negotiation and consensus.

When one of my students submits an essay containing the word 'over-exaggerate,' I correct it, striking out 'over-.' The word appears in dictionaries, so in that sense it's standard, and my correction is wrong, but it is an ugly, stupid word and should never appear in academic writing (and literate college students should know that). In my students' writing, it has increasingly replaced the simpler, better "exaggerate."

It's my responsibility as a teacher to encourage my students to think about the choices they make and the language they use, especially in an academic context, but I'm also hoping to cultivate the habit more broadly of just thinking about their choices, understanding that there are choices, and recognizing that the alternative is to be at the mercy of whatever consensus they're receiving from pop culture.

In most contexts, outside of a classroom, I won't bother with the correction, because it would be obviously unwelcome and inappropriate, but it has its place.

The line between descriptivism and prescriptivism is also very porous. Usage largely determines correctness, so unless you want to throw correctness completely out the window, there are going to be gray areas where either usage isn't widely agreed or where it really is necessary to correct language that falls afoul of standard usage regardless of whether the incorrect use will eventually be deemed correct.

Anyhow, 'disinterest''s disputed sense fills a hole in the language: 'uninterested' is a word; 'uninterest' isn't. People have solved the problem by collapsing the two words into one -- so that 'disinterest' and 'uninterest' are synonyms -- and throwing away the meaning of disinterest they use less often.

If I accept this, English loses some of its complexity and color. I don't want that.

Moreover, key texts and concepts become harder to appreciate if its sense corrupts this way. What do people think "disinterested justice" is if they don't know the meaning of the word? This kind of literacy is, I think, a basic building block of critical thinking. One can't think effectively, particularly in a social (political) setting, if one can't use words effectively.

When grading papers from students, it's reasonable to correct their usage. I'm probably reacting to all of this because the impetus of this discussion was someone rehashing a complaint that I suspect most of us have already heard about a word no longer only having a meaning that's so uncommon that it's not unreasonable for it to no longer have a single word for it stemming from its usage in an article by an author who likely won't ever read these comments.

I'm also not super convinced that people won't be able to understand concepts like "disinterested justice" because there's plenty of other terminology for that like "impartial" that are arguably much more common; I'm honestly not sure I've ever heard the term "disinterested justice" before now. I can at least see the value of that viewpoint being expressed even if I don't agree with it though, so in retrospect I should have responded before directly to the comment about "decimate" rather than replying to your response.

Interestingly, the macOS Dictionary app (which I believe uses some version of the OED) has this note about the word:

"Ironically, the earliest recorded sense of disinterested is for the disputed sense."

Decimated is from Latin decimātiō, where a large group of your army would be split into groups of 10, each group would draw straws, and the shortest straw would be stoned to death by the other 9. A completely brutal form of military punishment for capital offenses such as cowardice. It is not really adequately captured by reducing it to "kill one in every 10".

Wikipedia says it may be ahistorical though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

It also notes "In modern English, the word is used most commonly not to mean a destruction of a tenth but rather annihilation."

This is like saying people misinterpret the word "awful" or "literally"

There are good reasons to object to using "literally" as a meaningless filler word instead of, say, to mean "this sounds like hyperbole but it isn't". First, there are times when you need to indicate "this sounds like hyperbole but it isn't", and there really isn't a great alternative. Second, there's no point to having a meaningless filler word. If a sentence means exactly the same thing with and without the "literally", why is it there?

Per the original monster manual, it was never gone. I had to track down a source but it looks accurate. [1]

Amazing that pearl clutching over D&D rule changes has now extended to New Yorker magazine.

[1] http://realmsofauria.blogspot.com/2016/02/d-basic-monsters-d...

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample and eat everything they find because there is no natural control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin out their numbers.

>>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?

Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?

>> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.

Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains. Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.

Hunters are happy to take all the deer that they are legally allowed to. This is the fault of poor government management of hunting.

Do some actual research on wolves. They will kill a dozen cows in a day in a pen and not eat any of it.

>>They will kill a dozen cows in a day in a pen and not eat any of it.

To be honest with you - I don't even know where I'd begin to look for stats like these - have you got any links I could read?

I was only really able to ask Gemini about it which seems to confirm that wolves generally don't kill animals for any reason other than sustenance but obviously LLM so I accept it might be fully wrong - https://g.co/gemini/share/e1ce79cd97de

Don't farmers get reimbursed for livestock lost to natural predators?

farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.

A local small farmer nearly got bankrupted when mountain lions killed most of his alpaca herd along with a bunch of sheep and goats. The cats engaged in surplus killing and didn't bother eating most of their kills (the state thought perhaps a mother was teaching a cub hunting skills, but it's not like they got an interview with Mom).

Easy to talk smack until it happens to you or someone you know.

ranchers are not owed a predator free landscape. and creating one is definitely a poor environmental practice. betcha the next time they invest in donkeys and large guardian dogs like ranchers have for thousands of years.

Not in the USA. There a variety of random government programs that give money in ways that do not make sense. It would be better to have zero government support and have the market naturally raise prices up a bit to cover things directly. Right now, government programs are set up to take care of a variety of special interests, most of which are silly and don't really help farmers and are very wasteful. I had four government people visit my farm for several hours recently and spend several weeks writing papers, all for a possible $25k well grant. The admin costs far surpass that, and most of the farmers using these programs don't really want what they are getting that much.

This does not surprise me at all. The world would be a much better place if the leftists downvoting this weren't allowed to vote.

Yep, they are in my state, and at least a few others I know of.

A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.

Most of these studies are done by politically motivated people with zero connection to the real world. I have permanent electric fences all over my property and wolves and coyotes and deer easily jump over them. Unless a farmer is willing to spend so much money he goes bankrupt on a 10' fence with tons of welded wire, the wolves come through.

Well, even more recent reports from Germany also claim that wolves are damn clever to cope even with e-fences. Unfortunately, the question of wild wolves roaming the country now has become a cultural war issue where you can easily guess the left/right divide.

For our ecosystem, a well-managed wolf population is probably a good thing, but rationality is about to go out the window over here. Of course, wolves do not slaughter herds out of pure fun, but also true is that the can wreak quite a bit of economic damage if they break into a holding pen.

> need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits

A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers financial benefits.

One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might with an appeal to ecological reasons.

Where are you based? I’ve never heard this particular whinging before, the wolf populations across most of North America have been completely obliterated.

We're overdue for a horse archer empire as well

shouldn't be too long at the rate we are going.

Why does this feel like they’ll eventually get to modifying humans and this is a first step.

‘Son, you weren’t an accident, you were custom designed to be smarter than Einstein, faster than Bolt, with musical attitude rivaling Mozart.’

Sounds like a dystopian nightmare waiting to happen. Ban it now.

just because a couple of writers wrote some sad stories?

The term "dire" in "direwolf" comes from the Latin word "dirus," which translates to "terrible" or "fearsome." This name reflects the wolf's large size and predatory nature, as well as its status as a formidable hunter during the Pleistocene era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf

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