On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years made famous by the HBO show Game of Thrones.
These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including from TechCrunch, who were invited to view the live animals were not invited to the compound itself, located in the northern United States. Instead we flew to another secretive location to see the animals with our own eyes because in this age of AI, a photo can’t be trusted.
There we saw two six-month-old males named Remus and Romulus, each already weighing about 80-pounds. They looked to an inexperienced eye like very big wild dogs with slightly larger skulls and an elongated muzzle. In addition to Remus and Romulus, the company’s engineered dire wolf pack includes a female named Khaleesi, who is two months old.
But the company says that there’s very little that’s ordinary about them. Colossal’s dire wolves are a result of an 18-month effort based on the genes found in the fossils of a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull of the extinct animals.
When Colossal Biosciences announced its latest fundraise at a $10.2 billion valuation earlier this year, the company’s co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm told TechCrunch he believed the startup was undervalued given its actual scientific progress.
Given the common startup tendency to overstate capabilities, it wasn’t easy to take Lamm’s claims at face value, particularly since Collosal’s ambitious de-extinction projects for the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian Tiger were not slated for completion until 2028.
Since then, the company introduced breakthroughs that Colossal hoped would quell the skeptics’ doubts about its scientific advancements. Last month, the company announced that it engineered a mouse with mammoth-like fur. The woolly mice generated a lot of excitement.
But clearly, with the dire wolves, the company has taken its animal creation to a new level.
The company’s researchers compared the ancient DNA with the gray wolf and found that the species are 99.5% genetically identical. The scientists then used CRISPR technology to edit gray wolf cells with 20 genes that govern the dire wolf’s outward appearance. The genetically modified cells were turned into embryos, which were implanted into a large domestic dog, who then gave birth to the dire wolf pups.
The result, the company claims, is the first extinct species to be brought back to life.
Other scientists are skeptical
But many scientists who are not working for Colossal question whether they represent a true species revival.
“It is an impressive feat of genome editing, but I would not call it de-extinction,” David Gold, a professor of Paleobiology at UC Davis told TechCrunch.. “They have taken a grey wolf and modified some of its genes to mimic a dire wolf, making a sort of grey wolf / dire wolf hybrid. These animals are not being raised in a pack by other dire wolves, and they are not hunting in the wild, so I suspect their behavior will be different from a real dire wolf as well.”
That sentiment was echoed by Alexander Young, a professor of statistical genetics at UCLA, who wrote on X, “This seems massively overhyped. ‘Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf.’ In other words, it’s not a dire wolf – it’s a gray wolf modified to be more like a dire wolf. That’s a cool achievement but they have not ‘brought the dire wolf back’ sorry.”
When asked if the grey wolf genes that were edited aimed specifically at changing the external manifestations of the animal, George Church, Colossal co-founder and professor of genetics at Harvard University and MIT, told TechCrunch, “Some of them are aimed at the skull, which I think is internal.”
He added that only 0.3% of gray wolves’ genes were altered to make the dire wolf, and the remaining 0.2% variation was ultimately left unchanged.
The reason Colossal didn’t use all of the dire wolf’s recovered genes is because the scientists were worried those genes could cause deafness and blindness, Lamm said. “We felt, from an ethics perspective, we would not put that gene in there.”
Since we know that Remus, Romulus and Khaleesi are not 100% identical to the animals that roamed the world until about 12,000 years ago, can we really call them de-extincted dire wolves?
According to Gold, that’s essentially a philosophical question. Another question is: why dire wolves?
Saving red wolves
The idea for recreating the dire wolf came to Colossal by “sheer accident,” Lamm said. “We got additional capital and were looking at additional species we could work on.”
Dire Wolves represented the ideal confluence of factors for a cash-rich startup that claims to be ethically conscious and has many entertainment-savvy investors on its cap table.
“We like to pair de-extinction with conservation projects,” Lamm said.
A couple of years ago, Lamm and Matt James, the chief animal officer at Colossal, learned from the government of North Carolina that red wolves are nearly extinct, with fewer than 12 animals still roaming around the state. The state had been trying to save them from disappearing. That discovery coincided with the discussions with North Dakotan indigenous groups about the sacredness of wolves in their culture. And then, the company brought on George R.R. Martin, the writer of the Game of Thrones books, as an adviser to the company.
“It became this perfect Venn Diagram. We can bring back a species that’s culturally relevant, that our indigenous partners care about, and we can use the technologies to save the red wolves,” Lamm said.
The technology that Colossal used to engineer its dire wolves was also applied to create four red wolf clones. The company plans to make more red wolves and eventually re-wild them, which could save their species from extinction and increase biodiversity.
As for the plans for the dire wolves, Lamm said the company will likely create about five more animals so they can live in a pack, as wolves tend to do. Colossal is also talking to Indigenous communities about possibly re-wilding the dire wolves on their lands. For now, the company scientists and animal specialists are spending time monitoring their creations’ behavior and health.
Is this really a $10B+ business?
Then there’s another kind of question altogether: is the science that Colossal has demonstrated enough to entice investors to fund the company at escalating valuations. Time will tell but there are reasons to believe it could.
Lamm has laid out several potential revenue sources for the company. Colossal has already spun out two companies and plans to spin off three more businesses over the next two years, one of which will be for its artificial womb technology, which could have applications in fertility treatment.
The company may also one day start charging governments for help with endangered animal conservation. (Colossal currently provides its conservation technology at no cost, Lamm said.)
Finally, if the company successfully resurrects and reintroduces any of the species into their respective ecosystems, it may be able to generate revenue through the sale of biodiversity credits, a market-based mechanism similar to carbon credits.
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