Several scientists, including me, pointed out that Colossal Bioscience’s “dire wolves” were nothing like the extinct animals for which they were named, but only grey wolves with a few gene edits taken from ancient sequenced dire-wolf genomes.

Here’s a succinct summary from Wikipedia of the mishigass about this canid: (see also here); I’ve removed the numbered references for ease of reading, but they’re in the article:

In April 2025, it was announced that Colossal Biosciences used cloning and gene-editing to birth three genetically modified wolf pups, six-month-old males Romulus and Remus and two-month-old female Khaleesi. In-house scientists made 20 edits to 14 key genes in gray wolf EPC cells to match those genes from the dire wolf in order to recreate distinctive dire wolf traits. Colossal stated that these minor genetic modifications effectively revive dire wolves as a species. No ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome.

Independent experts disagreed with the Colossal Biosciences’ claim that these animals are revived dire wolves, asserting that they are “not a dire wolf under any definition of a species ever”.[128][129] The IUCN Species Survival Commission Canid Specialist Group officially declared that the three animals are neither dire wolves nor proxies of the dire wolves based on the IUCN SSC guiding principles on creating proxies of extinct species for conservation benefit. They commented that creating phenotypic proxies does not change the conservation status of an extinct species and may instead threaten the extant species such as gray wolves, and therefore concluded that the Colossal Biosciences’ project “does not contribute to conservation.”[130] Colossal Biosciences released a clarifying document Alignment of Colossal’s Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project with IUCN SSC Guiding Principles in response.

In May 2025, the company’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro stated that the three animals are “grey wolves with 20 edits” as purportedly stated by the company “from the very beginning”, acknowledging that it is impossible to bring back an extinct organism, or at least an organism “identical to a species that used to be alive”. She stated that the term “dire wolves” applied to the pups are a colloquialism. This was called a “major departure from what Colossal had said previously”.

One thing that people (including Wikipedia) do get wrong is how many edits in the gray wolf actually were derived from the dire wolf genome. It was 15, not 20. The rest were mutations known in domestic dogs and gray wolves that, thought Colossal Biosciences, would make the gray wolf resemble what they thought the dire wolf looked like.  As I wrote earlier:

There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.

Remember, nobody’s seen a real dire wolf, only its skeleton.  The idea that they were white seems to me ludicrous, as no wolves are white. Colossal engineered light coat-color mutations into gray wolves because the dire wolves in the show Game of Thrones were white.  Scientists believe that the ancient dire solves were either gray or reddish brown; white ones would have stuck out like sore thumbs to predators—except in canids, like Arctic Foxes, that live in the snow.

But does the public know this? I doubt it. And if they knew it, would they care? I doubt that, too. People like Paris Hilton, who have invested big bucks into Colossal’s dubious “de-extinction” projects, don’t care: they just want something that Colossal calls a dire wolf, just as other investors want a tweaked, hairy Asian elephant that Colossal—if it ever produces one—would call a “de-extincted woolly mammoth.”   Although Colossal’s head scientist Beth Shapiro finally admitted that Colossal didn’t really made dire wolves, she later backtracked, saying this according to the May 11 NYT:

The resulting animals [the gene-edited wolves] 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.”

Yep, according to Colossal, if you look even slightly like a dire wolf, you ARE a dire wolf. But this “capitalistic species concept” hasn’t fooled biologists except apparently those in the pay of Colossal. And it smacks of the woke-ish tendency to change the meaning of words if they buttress your well being (or your funding).

But I digress.  Yesterday I got a puff email from Colossal celebrating the first birthday of two of the edited gray wolves, and the company is STILL calling them dire wolves.  It even came with a special, albeit dreadful, birthday song. You must hear it! But first let’s see the email’s text, which I’ve pasted in below.

Note that they affirm that the two tweaked gray wolves were indeed “the first dire wolves to walk the Earth in over 10,000 years.”  That is of course dceply misleading, since the three creatures produced are not dire wolves like the ones from 10,000 years ago. They are modern grey wolves with a few genetic edits.  And if their story is a “banner of hope,” well, I find that misleading, too, since truly “de-extincting” a species has not only not been done, but will likely never be done. Nor is it something that many conservationists want to be done since the ancient animals would have to be put in an environment in which they didn’t evolve, and without the genes for behavior that allowed them to survive in ancient environments.

Here:


 

Here’s the song on YouTube. Be sure to listen to the “guitar crunching riffs, amazing solos, and sticky melodies” (what is a “sticky melody”?) produced by 80s “rock god” Stan Bush.  I don’t know Bush, or whether he really has the status of a “rock god,” but I’ll let Rick Beato pronounce on that.

Here’s the four-minuite birthday song!

Did you like that? I didn’t. The music is anodyne, with lame rhymes that remind me of a substandard version of “Eye of the Tiger.”  Plus, as far as I know, the newly created dire wolves are not allowed to hunt. And “nothing to stop you”?  They are kept in a fenced enclosure hidden from all but a few guests and, perhaps, investors. (You can see the fences that stop them in the video.) They will likely never be set free in any ecosystem except Colossal’s fenced enclosure.

And here’s the Instagram post with the same song: