Here’s a better article that isn’t as uncritically sensationalist.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/de-extinction-company-announces-that-the-dire-wolf-is-back/
tl;dr is that it’s basically just a gray wolf with 14 edited genes, most of which are from natural gray wolf populations rather than dire wolf genomes. The result is a gray wolf that’s visually similar to a dire wolf, not a dire wolf.
Wild the amount of money spent bring back an extict species instead of trying to protect the ones we already have.
Its like trying to justify ruining the environment and driving species to extinction as no biggie because we can just have a do-over through the power of science.
That’s exactly how it’s being presented. I’m not necessarily against the research, but there are only a few species we’ll be able to do this with. This isn’t a back door to undoing damage done. Plus, why do we do it with things that will have to live in captivity, as a wild release would reek havoc on an existing biome. Actually, this is probably true of anything, even seemingly docile ones.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.
i feel the same way. they made this video, though, which explains how the end product (ie. the pups) required the development of many other technologies that can help endangered species.
“We’ve taken a gray wolf genome, a gray wolf cell. which is already genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves because they’re very closely related,” Shapiro said. “And we’ve edited those cells at multiple places in its DNA sequence to contain the dire wolf version of the DNA.”
My understanding is that that they identified genes associated with 20 key characteristics of direwolves, and edited those genes in the grey wolf genome. I guarantee that there are likely thousands of direwolf genes that they overlooked, so technically they didn’t create a direwolf. They created a grey wolf that looks like a direwolf.
Great … a wolf that’s twice the size of a normal one … while we’re at, let’s put a machine gun on it … or maybe a lazer.
Make them hyper intelligent and give them thumbs.
Also, don’t forget to hit them with a stick periodically so they learn their place. They might develop a deep hatred for humans but that’s okay, it’s not like they’ll revolt and kill us all or anything.
