'DE-EXTINCT': The dire wolf
Image: Time Magazine
A MODERN-DAY Jurassic Park scenario is making headlines this week after Time magazine unveiled its latest cover: a snow-white wolf described as the first “de-extincted” dire wolf.
The announcement came from Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company known for its efforts to resurrect extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger.
According to the company, it has successfully bred three pups - Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi and are kept in a top-secret location - using ancient DNA and advanced genetic engineering to recreate the long-lost predator.
The dire wolf, made famous by Game of Thrones, was very real. It roamed North and South America more than 10 000 years ago during the last ice age. But scientists say what Colossal has created is not a true dire wolf.
Dr Nic Rawlence, a paleogeneticist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, told the BBC that the DNA recovered from dire wolf fossils is too damaged to clone.
Instead, scientists at Colossal edited those found segments into the genetic code of a grey wolf - its closest living relative.
The edited cells were cloned, and embryos implanted into domestic dog surrogates.
Dr Beth Shapiro, a biologist with Colossal Biosciences, defended the project, saying. “A grey wolf is the closest living relative of a dire wolf—they’re genetically really similar.”
However Rawlence says: “Colossal compared the genomes of the dire wolf and the grey wolf, and from about 19 000 genes, they determined that 20 changes in 14 genes gave them a dire wolf.”