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?
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.
This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we don’t know well.
But yeah, clever marketing by this company.
> 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.
I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.
That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).