Despite their name and geographical range in North America and a small part of South America, dire wolves were more closely related to African jackals than grey wolves. You have to go back up to 6 million years to find a living common ancestor.
Dire wolves went extinct some 10,000-12,000 years ago, probably because their megaherbivore prey also disappeared around this time.
Now the biosciences firm Colossal has announced it has brought the dire wolf back from extinction, but many scientists are crying foul. What Colossal has done, they point out, is edited some of the genes of the not-very-closely related grey wolf to make it resemble their distant cousin.
“Colossal has introduced a small number of changes to the genetic material of a grey wolf to produce grey wolf pups with dire wolf features such as pale coats and a potentially larger size,” says Philip Seddon, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
Nic Rawlence of the same university’s Palaeogenetics Laboratory wonders how the pups will learn how to be dire wolves. “Currently, they’re wolves running around in a paddock. And does the ecosystem it once lived in still exist?”
But Colossal firmly rejects the many criticisms that have been made. Chief science officer Beth Shapiro says it doesn’t matter that the two species are not closely related.
“When Colossal successfully edited 20 carefully chosen genetic variants into grey wolf DNA – 15 of them extinct variants that haven’t existed for over 12,000 years – we were attempting to resurrect key features tied to the functional essence of an extinct species,” she adds.
Those features, it says, include being 20-25 per cent larger than a grey wolf and having more muscle mass and an Arctic white coat.
On the issue of how these animals will learn to be dire wolves, Shapiro says Colossal has created management strategies modelled on red wolf and Mexican grey wolf reintroduction programmes.
“Those strategies include a stepwise approach to reducing human intervention, mimicking wild diet types and increasing the difficulty in which food items are presented to encourage the expression of wild behaviours,” she says.
Colossal has become well-known for its pioneering approach to gene-editing extant, living species to make them more closely resemble related extinct ones – it is also attempting this with both the thylacine and the woolly mammoth, but what it has called the Colossal dire wolf is its first actual success with the technology.
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