{"id":186189,"date":"2025-10-03T00:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/186189\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:09:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:09:08","slug":"a-new-song-from-a-rock-god-celebrates-the-first-birthday-of-colossal-biosciences-genetically-tweaked-grey-wolves-aka-dire-wolves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/186189\/","title":{"rendered":"A new song from a \u201crock god\u201d celebrates the first birthday of Colossal Bioscience\u2019s genetically tweaked grey wolves (aka \u201cdire wolves\u201d)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several scientists, including me<\/a>, pointed out that Colossal Bioscience\u2019s \u201cdire wolves<\/a>\u201d were nothing like the extinct animals for which they were named, but only grey wolves<\/a> with a few gene edits taken from ancient sequenced dire-wolf genomes.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a succinct summary from Wikipedia<\/a> of the mishigass about this canid: (see also here<\/a>); I\u2019ve removed the numbered references for ease of reading, but they\u2019re in the article:<\/p>\n

In April 2025, it was announced that\u00a0Colossal Biosciences<\/a>\u00a0used\u00a0cloning<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0gene-editing<\/a>\u00a0to birth\u00a0three genetically modified wolf pups<\/a>, six-month-old males Romulus and Remus and two-month-old female Khaleesi. In-house scientists made 20 edits to 14 key genes in\u00a0gray wolf<\/a>\u00a0EPC cells<\/a> to match those genes from the dire wolf in order to recreate distinctive dire wolf traits. Colossal stated that these minor genetic modifications effectively revive dire wolves as a species. No ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf\u2019s genome.<\/p>\n

Independent experts disagreed with the Colossal Biosciences\u2019 claim that these animals are revived dire wolves, asserting that they are \u201cnot a dire wolf under any definition of a species ever\u201d.[128]<\/a>[129]<\/a>\u00a0The\u00a0IUCN Species Survival Commission<\/a>\u00a0Canid Specialist Group officially declared that the three animals are neither dire wolves nor proxies of the dire wolves based on the IUCN SSC guiding principles on creating proxies of extinct species for conservation benefit. They commented that creating phenotypic proxies does not change the conservation status of an extinct species and may instead threaten the extant species such as gray wolves, and therefore concluded that the Colossal Biosciences\u2019 project \u201cdoes not contribute to conservation.\u201d[130]<\/a>\u00a0Colossal Biosciences released a clarifying document\u00a0Alignment of Colossal\u2019s Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project with IUCN SSC Guiding Principles in response.<\/p>\n

In May 2025, the company\u2019s chief scientist\u00a0Beth Shapiro<\/a>\u00a0stated that the three animals are \u201cgrey wolves with 20 edits\u201d as purportedly stated by the company \u201cfrom the very beginning\u201d, acknowledging that it is impossible to bring back an extinct organism, or at least an organism \u201cidentical to a species that used to be alive\u201d. She stated that the term \u201cdire wolves\u201d applied to the pups are a\u00a0colloquialism<\/a>. This was called a \u201cmajor departure from what Colossal had said previously\u201d.<\/p>\n

One thing that people (including Wikipedia) do get wrong is how many edits in the gray wolf actually were derived from the dire wolf genome. It was 15, not 20. The rest were mutations known in domestic dogs and gray wolves that, thought Colossal Biosciences, would make the gray wolf resemble what they thought the dire wolf looked like.\u00a0 As I wrote earlier<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren\u2019t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from\u00a0mutations in dogs and gray wolves\u00a0that\u00a0resembled\u00a0what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We\u2019re still not sure.) And among those five dog\/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.<\/p>\n

Remember, nobody\u2019s seen a real dire wolf, only its skeleton.\u00a0 The idea that they were white seems to me ludicrous, as no wolves are white. Colossal engineered light coat-color mutations into gray wolves because the dire wolves in the show Game of Thrones were white<\/a>.\u00a0 Scientists believe that the ancient dire solves were either gray or reddish brown; white ones would have stuck out like sore thumbs to predators\u2014except in canids, like Arctic Foxes, that live in the snow.<\/p>\n

But does the public know this? I doubt it. And if they knew it, would they care? I doubt that, too. People like Paris Hilton, who have invested big bucks into Colossal\u2019s dubious \u201cde-extinction\u201d projects, don\u2019t care: they just want something that Colossal calls a dire wolf, just as other investors want a tweaked, hairy Asian elephant that Colossal\u2014if it ever produces one\u2014would call a \u201cde-extincted woolly mammoth.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Although Colossal\u2019s head scientist Beth Shapiro finally admitted<\/a> that Colossal didn\u2019t really made dire wolves, she later backtracked<\/a>, saying this according to the May 11 NYT<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The resulting animals [the gene-edited wolves] were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company\u2019s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the \u201cmorphological species concept,\u201d which defines a species by its appearance. \u201cSpecies concepts are human classification systems,\u201d she told New Scientist, \u201cand everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yep, according to Colossal, if you look even slightly like a dire wolf, you ARE a dire wolf. But this \u201ccapitalistic species concept\u201d hasn\u2019t fooled biologists except apparently those in the pay of Colossal. And it smacks of the woke-ish tendency to change the meaning of words if they buttress your well being (or your funding).<\/p>\n

But I digress.\u00a0 Yesterday I got a puff email from Colossal celebrating the first birthday of two of the edited gray wolves, and the company is STILL calling them dire wolves.\u00a0 It even came with a special, albeit dreadful, birthday song. You must hear it! But first let\u2019s see the email\u2019s text, which I\u2019ve pasted in below.<\/p>\n

Note that they affirm that the two tweaked gray wolves were indeed \u201cthe first dire wolves to walk the Earth in over 10,000 years.\u201d\u00a0 That is of course dceply misleading, since the three creatures produced are not dire wolves like the ones from 10,000 years ago. They are modern grey wolves with a few genetic edits.\u00a0 And if their story is a \u201cbanner of hope,\u201d well, I find that misleading, too, since truly \u201cde-extincting\u201d a species has not only not been done, but will likely never be done. Nor is it something that many conservationists want to be done since the ancient animals would have to be put in an environment in which they didn\u2019t evolve, and without the genes for behavior that allowed them to survive in ancient environments.<\/p>\n

Here:<\/p>\n


<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the song on YouTube. Be sure to listen to the \u201cguitar crunching riffs, amazing solos, and sticky melodies\u201d (what is a \u201csticky melody\u201d?) produced by 80s \u201crock god\u201d Stan Bush<\/a>.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know Bush, or whether he really has the status of a \u201crock god,\u201d but I\u2019ll let Rick Beato pronounce on that.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the four-minuite birthday song!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Did you like that? I didn\u2019t. The music is anodyne, with lame rhymes that remind me of a substandard version of \u201cEye of the Tiger.\u201d\u00a0 Plus, as far as I know, the newly created dire wolves are not allowed to hunt. And \u201cnothing to stop you\u201d?\u00a0 They are kept in a fenced enclosure hidden from all but a few guests and, perhaps, investors. (You can see the fences that stop them in the video.) They will likely never be set free in any ecosystem except Colossal\u2019s fenced enclosure.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the Instagram post with the same song:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several scientists, including me, pointed out that Colossal Bioscience\u2019s \u201cdire wolves\u201d were nothing like the extinct animals for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-186189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}