Sensational dire wolf claims questioned by scientists: 'Extinction is forever'

Sensational claims by a United States company that it has brought an extinct animal back from the dead have been questioned by scientists. Rather than recreating a dire wolf, as claimed by Colossal Biosciences, several leading New Zealand-based animal experts claim the company has simply produced a modern-day gray wolf 'with dire wolf-like characteristics'.
'This is not a de-extincted dire wolf, rather it's a 'hybrid'. And importantly, it's what they think are the important dire wolf-like characteristics,' University of Otago paleogeneticist Associate Professor Nic Rawlence said.
Because dire wolves were wiped out 12,500 years ago, the snippets of its DNA that remain have been heavily degraded and can't be faithfully sequenced. Dire wolves diverged from gray wolves up to six million years ago, and Rawlence has dismissed the notion that 20 changes to 14 genes to the latter species is significant enough to claim the former has been brought back from extinction.
Colossal regularly makes international headlines for its ongoing work to bring the Tasmanian tiger, dodo, and wooly mammoth back from extinction.
On Tuesday, it's CEO Ben Lamm announced its unexpected dire wolf news. "Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies," he said.
While it's achievements like this that make headlines, the company is also quietly funding important scientific advancements in wildlife protection. In March, it announced a $US3 million investment in the University of Melbourne, which is working to genetically modify frogs so they aren't killed by chytrid fungus, a disease that has already led to the decline of 500 amphibian species, including 90 extinctions.
Also on Tuesday, Colossal revealed it had cloned red wolves, the world's most critically endangered wolf. Importantly, this achievement adds new genetic complexity to a species that was almost declared extinct in the 1960s and is threatened by a lack of diversity in the DNA of the tiny population that remains.
While many scientists are in awe of the company's advancements in genetic engineering, it's the claims that it makes about de-extinction that are frequently called into question.
In March, when the company revealed it had created a wooly mouse with similar traits to a mammoth, it was commended for continuing to remind the community about the "power" of genetic modifications. But a leading molecular genetics expert at the University of NSW, predicted the de-extinction of mammoths was decades away.
'It's not a matter of changing seven genes, you would have to change thousands, and you have to do the reproductive biology too. Overall, it would be like stacking up ladders to get to the moon,' Professor Merlin Crossley said.
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Colossal's dire wolf claims have sparked similar scepticism from other New Zealand-based experts. Professor Philip Seddon from the University of Otago's department of zoology said the company's creation no doubt involved 'amazing technological breakthroughs', but he dismissed the notion that its new pups, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are real dire wolves.
'Certainly, this involves advances in genetic technology, and these might have applications for the conservation of existing species — but the return of dire wolves? No,' he said.
'In the same way that Colossal's plans for woolly mammoths and dodos will involve the genetic modification of related species. We have GMO wolves, and might one day have GMO Asian elephants, but for now extinction really is forever."
Associate Professor Michael Knapp from the University of Otago's Department of Anatomy agreed.
'These new dire wolves are genetically almost certainly closer to gray wolves than to ancient dire wolves, but they look more like dire wolves than gray wolves. These are not the dire wolves that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, as the press release may suggest,' he said.
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