Nothing could go wrong here: Scientists bring dire wolf back from extinction after 11,000 years

Bring this on. I want multi-purpose pets that have more ways to entertain me. First, I want a cat with wings and rather than a meow he should be able to speak Mexican.

Let’s raise them inside crocodiles. The Alligataurus Rex, oh yeaaaah! Chomping off woolly mammoths when those get recreated, booyah!

But they are very cute, so make more of them, yes yes yes!

They should make a clone army of Trumps like in Star Wars. Except this clone army would be sent out to make deals.

Hear me out…wolfadoodles!

I predict dire consequences.

I predict dire consequences.

But these dire wolves look like fluffy stuffed animals. I expected that they would be ferocious looking beasts that make pitbulls look like Bichon Frisé

Birds would be the closest relatives. But I assume that eventually scientific advancement will have a more plausible solution to the host issue: eliminate the need for a surrogate, especially for non-mammals that hatch from eggs (like dinosaurs). The whole thing will be in vitro.

There is no getting around the lack of viable DNA, however.

So these pups aren’t really dire wolves at all, then?

It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. "We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal."

jurassic park ant real

This is pretty cool tech but almost criminally overhyped.

The dire wolf and modern wolf diverged around 5 million years ago and differ at around 30 million DNA positions across the genome. That's roughly similar to humans and chimpanzees, which diverged around 6.5 million years ago.

The lab engineered 20 DNA edits into a wolf genome -- that's 20 edits out of 30 million positions. They selected edits that they predicted contributed relatively more to the dire wolf phenotype, but it's ludicrous to say that they created a dire wolf.

It's a pity because the overhype takes away from the fact that it is actually an impressive technological feat to stack this many precise genome edits into a single non-model organism genome. But the extreme hype and lack of transparency (no publication or preprint) means that I have lost all respect for this team.

I really like this idea - it sounds beautiful. Roaming woolly mammoths, free and with the wind in their faces. Unfortunately I fear people would hunt them but it's a lovely thought.

Thanks. This whole episode has taught not to trust the mainstream media yet again.

No mention of the fact it might not be legit. ABC is a joke.

I shouldn't have shared the link in the 1st post without doing a little research. I was just trying to be nice to ABC as I had seen the video on MSN and was trying to link to an original source. Ironicailly, the story I linked to had a different video in it.

The poster talking about money seems to have nailed it - think the company probably is some type of theranos type hype machine.

Colossal says its investors include Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Paris Hilton and Peter Jackson.

Paris Hilton and Tom Brady - scientific experts. LOL.

The Theranos analogy is inaccurate because they have serious scientists involved and I don't doubt that they did the 20 CRISPR edits they claim to have done. And that is actually a significant technical achievement.

The problem is that they then claim that this is enough to create a dire wolf. The hype itself seems borderline criminal, and the journalists are too credulous here about the exact science. But you need someone who understands population genetics to actually point out how ridiculous that is.

We should be sending "Noah's *Craft" to Mars and pther planets to see what survives. I think we have forgotten and unlikely members of the plant and animal kingdoms that will survive and adapt.

I just hope scientists don't decide to bring back Homo Erectus because we already have way to many Democrats.

The brain trust behind Colossal is legit. George Church is as close to a living legend in synthetic biology / biotech / genetics as you can get.

The dire wolf genome is public and what they used to guide their engineering efforts. I assume as some point (soon) they will publish the 20 engineered genes which they claim were sufficient to drive the re-speciation to a dire world.

The hype is a bit much, we don’t know the exact changes here, but the company isn’t a SCAM - its valuation is hilariously high, but no realistic path to revenue - but the people working on it are the real deal.