1 week ago
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Name: Dire wolves.
Age: About 125,000 years old.
Appearance: Living and breathing.
Well, that’s good to know. Thanks for a mercifully brief Pass Notes. Wait, you don’t understand. Dire wolves have been extinct for more than 10,000 years.
I knew there’d be a catch. So what happened? Why, Colossal Biosciences Inc happened.
Is that a real name? Yes, it’s the real name of a real US company that just announced it has successfully bred three brand-new dire wolf pups, after editing some DNA recovered from ancient remains. Two were born in October, one in January. It’s being billed as the world’s first “de-extinction”.
It’s like Jurassic Park come to life! Yes, Jurassic Park, that film about a famously successful business where everyone was happy and nothing went wrong.
Did this actually happen? Yes. Scientists extracted DNA from a 72,000-year-old dire wolf inner-ear bone and a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth, combined it with grey wolf cells, edited the genes to make the animals larger and more muscular, inserted the resulting cells into domestic dog egg cells and implanted those into another dog’s womb. And lo, a dire wolf was born.
And what are the animals like? Massive. Six-month-old pups Romulus and Remus weigh 36kg, 25% more than a grey wolf would at this age, and measure nearly 1.2 metres (4ft). By the time they are fully grown they could weigh 68kg, making them some of the largest carnivores on the planet.
Am I right to feel a building sense of existential dread? No, don’t worry. The dire wolves are being kept at a top-secret nature reserve in the US. You’re safe for now. Although life finds a way and all that.
Pardon? No, nothing. Everything’s fine.
Wow, they really brought back the dire wolf. Well now, steady on. Some geneticists have claimed that these pups can’t be true dire wolves because they aren’t being raised in a dire wolf pack, and thus can’t fully learn true dire wolf behaviour. Also, the scientists made only 20 gene edits to the cells, which means they could be wildly inaccurate.
So there are just a load of random, human-created giant wolves running around? Pretty much. That’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?
Hang on, has this got something to do with Game of Thrones? Yes, there are dire wolves in Game of Thrones. And the third pup has been named Khaleesi. It’s safe to say the scientists are fans.
So they used this technology to make dire wolves, when they could have made … The White Walkers from HBO’s hit show? Ice monsters determined to eliminate all of humanity as we know it!
I was going to say three-eyed ravens. Oh yes, those too.
Do say: “Dire wolves have been reintroduced, thanks to Game of Thrones.”
Don’t say: “I can’t believe they invented a new species of animal in less time than it took George RR Martin to finish the next book.”
