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Scientists Claim to Have Brought Back the Dire Wolf
Startup Colossal Biosciences has edited the DNA of a gray wolf to produce what it says is a de-extincted animal. Does that make it a true dire wolf?
A large canine species that once roamed the Americas, dire wolves coexisted with other Ice Age megafauna, such as saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly mammoths. For this de-extinction project, Shapiro and her colleagues returned to two dire wolf fossils sequenced in that original paper: A 13,000-year-old tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho. David Jachowski, a professor of conservation at Clemson University in South Carolina, says that there’s “inherently some subjectivity” when it comes to defining species, and that the role an animal plays in its ecosystem may be as important as its genetics.
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