Dire Wolves?

Colossal Biosciences, which spent years trying and failing to bring back the woolly mammoth, now claims to have brought back the dire wolf. (NY Times, Time, company post on Twitter/X with wolf pup howls)

Sort of. What they did was find some dire wolf DNA, identify 22 places on the genome where they differed from modern gray wolves, alter those locations to be like their dire wolves, insert that DNA in a gray wolf egg cell and have it carried to term by a wolf.

The offspring are different from modern wolves, bigger and with paler, thicker fur. So they are something different from modern wolves. But I am not willing to call them dire wolves.

Still, this is pretty cool, the biggest step yet in the de-extinction program. But note that dire wolves were so closely related to gray wolves that they seem to have interbred with them in the past. Nothing about this success says we might be close to bringing back animals without such a close living relative.