Kaia Anderson, contributor

On April 7, Colossal Biosciences announced that three pups had been born: Remus, Romulus and Kahleesi, the first dire wolves that have been seen in 13,000 years — the world’s first de-extinction, writes the New York Times. According to NPR, this is the same lab that produced the woolly mice a month ago by implanting modified embryos into female mice after studying the genes of the now-extinct woolly mammoth. A similar process was used to revive the dire wolf. Science News outlines how scientists were able to take DNA from a fossilized tooth and ear bone that once belonged to dire wolves over 10,000 years ago and study it. Then, editing gray wolf DNA, they developed embryos that were implanted into female hounds. 

It is important to note that no dire wolf DNA was added to the gray wolf. This has caused much debate on whether or not these pups can be called dire wolves or if they are simply genetically edited gray wolves. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists heavily disagrees with this notion of de-extinction. Elinor Karlsson, an expert in wolf and dog genetics, told The Bulletin, “Why are you calling this a dire wolf when it’s a gray wolf with seventeen or eighteen changes in its DNA?” Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist from the University of Maine, also backs up this side of the debate in the same article, “The work that’s being done at Colossal has not brought a species back from extinction… [It’s] a genetically modified wolf.” 

Wired shares Colossal’s Chief Science Officer Beth Shapiro’s opinion, “If we can look at this animal and see what it’s doing, and it looks like a dire wolf and acts like a dire wolf, I’m going to call it a dire wolf. And my colleagues who are taxonomists will disagree with me.” 

The alleged return of the dire wolf has also sparked concern for the environment and other endangered species. Rich Grenyer, a professor of biodiversity, wrote in an article for The Conversation that de-extinction is not a useful or needed concept in today’s world and that introducing long-dead animals to native ecosystems would do more harm than good. Gray wolves are already filling the spots within food chains that the dire wolf dominated in the past. More importantly, new or de-extinct animals will have no idea how to live within new habitats if released into the wild. “There won’t be a dire wolf, and even if there were to be one, we’d have no idea what it was for (and neither would it),” Greyner writes.