Dire Wolf Brought Back by Scientists

F
rom certain angles, the white canids on the video call, chewing on branches in the grass, look like Samoyeds: huge, white, fluffy faces and big black noses. Just when you start considering what it might feel like to wrap your arms around them and bury your face in the five-inch deep fur around their necks, they lower their gaze and you can see just how long and pointed their snout is — the better to follow Ice-Age scent trails — and how their big golden eyes are set low and forward on the front of their head, partway down the slant of their nose, the better for these carnivorous hunters to target their prehistoric prey. 

Just then, a sound off camera startles the pups and they bolt towards the tree line, scattering like deer across a meadow — if deer had broader shoulders, long fluffy tails, and paws the diameter of softballs and still growing. They quickly settle down to continue gnawing on sticks, but the reminder of their power and wildness lingers. These aren’t dogs, or even modern-day wolves. They’re dire wolf pups, back from extinction after some 12,000 years. 

If you thought dire wolves were the stuff of Game of Thrones lore, you’re not alone. It’s an assumption George R. R. Martin himself repeatedly needs to correct. “You’d be surprised at how many people seem to think I invented the dire wolf,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Much as I would love to take credit for that, it’s just not so. Dire wolves were real, one of the apex predators of the Ice Age.”

The modern dire wolves, Romulus and Remus, born in October, plus a third, younger pup, Khaleesi, born in January, are the results of efforts by bioscience startup Colossal, which launched in 2021. You may know the company for recently producing headline-grabbing and objectively adorable woolly mice as part of their cornerstone effort to bring back the woolly mammoth, but Colossal’s dire wolf project has since outpaced the mammoth, thanks to an abundance of science — both genetic and reproductive — available about dogs compared to elephants.

Colossal, cofounded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and renowned geneticist George Church, aims to use CRISPR gene-editing technology to not only bring back prehistoric creatures, but to save species threatened by extinction today. What to do with resurrected ancient species in the long run remains somewhat up in the air, but according to Lamm, who is also CEO, their efforts are an important part of rescuing species everywhere from disappearing forever. “We are in the sixth mass extinction, and it is human-caused,” he says, referring to periods of major species die-offs throughout geological time, the previous iterations of which scientists believe were caused by asteroids or volcanos. “While there’s different perspectives around human-caused climate change, I think everyone understands that if we over-fish the oceans, there’s less fish. If we cut down the rainforest, there’s less habitat for those animals. People are receptive to that.”

Dire wolves thrived during the Pleistocene Epoch, when they roamed in packs across what would later become the Americas. Standing between 3.4 and 3.8 feet tall — significantly taller than gray wolves, which are around 2.5 feet tall — they hunted bison and horses, and sometimes ground sloths, with prey varying depending on where they lived. Around 10,000 BCE, they died out, likely due to a scarcity of food during a period of global warming. The first fossils were found in the 1850s in Indiana and Nebraska, and the species’ original latin name, Canis Dirus, meant terrible wolf. Bringing it back is a groundbreaking move and one whose consequences cannot yet be understood.

The orphaned dire wolves adopted by the Stark children in Game of Thrones were inspired by Martin’s visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, where a glowing, back-lit wall showcases 400 dire wolf skulls found at the site. “They make for quite a display, and they certainly made an impression on me the first time I saw them,” says Martin, who is a Colossal investor. “I have always loved wolves. There is something primal and powerful about them….That day in La Brea, the dire wolf took hold of my imagination, and never let go.”

A New Direction

The dire wolf is a relatively new project for Colossal. The startup had been working the past few years on three species: the mammoth, their marquee animal, which Lamm estimates will be ready by 2028, plus the dodo and the thylacine, a marsupial also known as the Tamsanian tiger. When their efforts attracted celebrity investors, including Tom Brady and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, and generated a fresh supply of capital, Colossal began searching for another species to add to their roster.

The company decided on the dire wolf for two main reasons: their ancient DNA was available, and they can safely be born using a surrogate. Also pulling in the dire wolf’s favor, Lamm adds, were the multiple tribal leaders who’d spoken to him about the importance of wolves to their land and culture. 

As for the decision to bring back a predator known to be 20 percent larger than a gray wolf — the largest living canine — James says dire wolves aren’t anything for humans to feel nervous about, in a personal, life-and-limb sense. “It’s those weird things where people are afraid of sharks, and that’s just not really a good thing, because sharks are good for the ecosystem,” Lamm says. As for the wolves threatening livestock or other species, Colossal has no plan to release the wolves truly back into the wild. “Our long term goal is to put them back into expansive ecological preserves, but to do that in a in a that’s far away from humans, far away from cattle, far away from everything that there would be conflict around, and probably on indigenous land because of the spiritual connection to them,” Lamm says.

To build the dire wolves, scientists at Colossal, led by chief science officer Beth Shapiro, extracted DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone and fed it into a sequencing machine. Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist, describes this process as solving a trillion-piece puzzle, “where only some of the pieces actually go to the puzzle, and the picture on the top of the box is kind of similar to the puzzle, but not exactly the same.” In other words, you’re glad a machine is doing the work.

Nine months of computational power later, they had a reconstructed genome that once made up the dire wolf. From there, Shapiro and her team compared it to that of the gray wolf, finding the places where the dire wolf genome varied, giving dire wolves their dire-wolfish attributes, like a light coloring, larger stature, and denser, longer coats. They wound up taking an alternative route to a light coat, because certain variations in the pigmentation gene have been linked to deafness and blindness in dogs. “Our primary goal is to make healthy animals,” Shapiro says. They opted to edit a different gene for coat lightness. “Fortunately, we know a lot about coat color in gray wolves, so we could identify other genetic changes that are safe in gray wolves.” They edited all variations into the gray wolf’s genome and performed quality control checks to ensure the cells remained healthy as they grew.

‘Functionally Equivalent’ 

Here, Shapiro says, people should understand an important detail of the project: it is impossible for the DNA of these new cells to be 100 percent identical to their prehistoric ancestors. “There’s probably millions of differences between gray wolves and dire wolves, and the DNA editing technology is not sufficiently robust that we can make all of those changes simultaneously without causing the cell to melt down,” she says. “Until we can synthesize a whole genome from scratch, we can’t make something that’s 100 percent genetically identical, but it’s also not necessary, because what we’re trying to do is create a functional equivalent of that species that used to be there.”

The implications of this are two-fold. First, to paraphrase Shapiro, haters gonna hate. “My colleagues in the field of taxonomy are going to be like, ‘It’s not a dire wolf,’” she says. “And that’s fine, but to me, if it looks like a dire wolf and it acts like a dire wolf, I’m gonna call it a dire wolf.” 

Second, it means that extinction — even if only on a taxonomical technicality — still really is forever. People shouldn’t get complacent about letting endangered species die off because we think we can just genetically engineer them back into existence. “De-extinction is not a solution to the extinction crisis, and we never want to say that it is,” Shapio says. “Extinction is forever.” Instead, the idea is to welcome an animal that can thrive on Earth today, in a different environment with different resources than were available when they first walked the planet. The question remains as to whether they could ever make it on their own — and how they would actually impact ecosystems — outside the watchful eye of caretakers dedicated to maintaining ideal conditions for their survival.

Wolves to the Front

The dire wolf pulled ahead of Colossal’s mammoth-revival efforts for a key reason, according to Shapiro: the scientific community has done lots more research on their relatives, wolves, than they have on mammoth’s relatives, elephants. “It’s a much easier space to work in, both in terms of learning how the DNA edits that we make might affect the animal, and regarding [their] reproductive biology,” she says. There’s still a lot to learn about embryo transfer in an elephant, for example, she says. For dogs, it’s no sweat.

Identical twins Romulus and Remus arrived via scheduled C-section to their hound-mix surrogate mothers on Oct. 1, 2024, on the wolves’ 2,000-acre fenced-in preserve at a secret location in United States with tons of space and four seasons, producing the necessary median temperature and rainfall for the species to thrive. 

Matt James, chief animal officer at Colossal, still remembers the first time he heard the baby wolves howl. He was one of three on the care team staying on-site and giving the pups around-the-clock feedings every two hours. One day, when the wolves were five or six weeks old, another person working with the pups was singing to them, performing the wordless vocalizations that Ariel in The Little Mermaid sings when Ursula is stealing her voice. “Suddenly, one of them triggered a howl, and then the other one started howling, and we all lost our minds,” James says. “We’re sitting there in a vet clinic, exhausted from all these overnight feeds, and then suddenly: howls. And you remember, holy shit, that’s the first fucking time in 12,000 years that this species has howled.”

Unfortunately, none of us will get to hear those howls in person any time soon, because the wolves aren’t accepting visitors. Lamm says he wants to keep the wolves safe from overzealous fans, which Colossal began accruing after it debuted the wooly mice. “We’ve had people showing up to our labs,” he says. “It’s been nuts. So I just want to be very secure about the wolves.” 

Two layers of nine-foot fencing keeps the wolves in, and a series of cameras and drones monitor the wolves’ location when they’re roaming the full 2,000 acres — about two and a half times the size of Central Park. There’s a smaller six-acre contained area where the wolves can be lured for feedings or vet checkups. Right now, the five-month-old brothers, who already weigh more than 80 pounds, get six pounds of ground horse, deer, and beef, plus some dry kibble every day. While the plan is for them to graduate to consuming whole dead animals, they and Khaleesi will never hunt their own dinner. James says releasing live prey into the preserve would be “cruel and unusual” — since the pups have never been taught by other wolves how to finish a kill, it would be an ugly scene if they tried and failed

A Thing of Dreams

Martin is one of the few people who’s gotten to visit the wolves, and. Lamm says Martin wept when he met them. “I never imagined I would ever actually see [a dire wolf],” Martin says. “The day I met Romulus and Remus and cradled Romulus in my arms is a day I will remember for the rest of my life.”

On HBO’s Game of Thrones, Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, is the only Stark child whose white dire wolf matches the light-colored coat Colossal’s scientists are convinced they really had. “That a dire wolf, a ‘Ghost,’ has been brought back to life is very emotional,” says Harrington, who is an advisor to the startup. “This is science that can help prevent and undo some of the ills we have inflicted on the natural world whilst bringing back some of the wonder and joy we have been stripping ourselves of.”

Colossal walks the line between Jurassic Park–fantasy and scientific pragmatism. Lamm delights in receiving fan mail with mammoth drawings from children, developing dire wolf merch (for gifts, not to sell), and in the overall, undeniable Hollywood appeal of building a company around resurrecting ancient beasts. Recently, he got to sit atop an actual GOT throne set piece — on loan from Peter Jackson — for a photo shoot with Romulus and Remus. In a way, he’s like a kid watching his own dreams take shape. He seems eager to offer that to others. “I have a nine-month-old son now, and I’m like, you’re going to grow up in a world with dire wolves and mammoths,” he says. “It’s like magic.”

At the same time, the company is making huge scientific breakthroughs, and they seem to be cautiously shouldering that responsibility. There’s the no-visitors rule, and no plans to let them loose. “The goal is not to release dire wolves into the wild where they will compete with gray wolves,” Shapiro says. “One of the goals of this project is to bring attention to the plight of gray wolves who really need our help and our protection,” she says. 

Lamm adds a conservation partnership to every species they aim to revive. As part of the dire wolf project, Colossal has also cloned four endangered red wolves, using a new cloning technology they developed — it uses a blood draw rather than a more invasive tissue sample — that could help boost the numbers of the world’s most endangered wolf species. Lamm encountered the species’ plight on a visit to North Carolina, home to the last 12 or so remaining red wolves in the wild. “We’re supposed to be this beacon of innovation, and I was like, why can’t we like — why are we not making more wolves?” Lamm says. The company makes all of their new technologies available to the conservation community for free.

It’s not all about extinct species, Colossal staff say. The same gene-editing technology that resurrected dire wolves can be used to save species currently being threatened by extinction by making them more resilient to environmental threats. “This is one of the things that I find most exciting about these technologies,” Shapiro says. She points to Colossal’s partnership with the University of Melbourne to use gene editing to make the Australian quoll immune to the poison of the cane toad, a species introduced to the continent less than 100 years ago that is quickly multiplying and damaging the marsupial’s population. “If we could make quoll with this single mutation, they could eat the cane toads and not die,” she says. “That means that they will survive, and also that they will eat cane toads, which people in Australia would be quite excited about.”

James sees a positive future for Colassal’s technologies, too, and chafes against the most obvious of Hollywood comparisons. “This isn’t a Jurassic Park, ‘They were so busy wondering if they could, they forgot to ask if they should’ type of situation,” he says. He is excited to see the power of their technologies harnessed for conservation efforts. He adds, “Helping to shape technologies that are going to change the conservation space has been the coolest three years of my life, and hopefully the next 30, as well.”