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The Dire Wolf Is Back

Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal’s extinct ancestors. Is the woolly mammoth next?

Lamm, who pitches as naturally as he talks, quickly raised sixteen million dollars from investors, promising them that Colossal would “spin the tech out” for a profit by, say, repurposing any advances that it achieved in genetic engineering for the benefit of human health. She’d been instrumental in establishing the field of DNA recovery, and had won a MacArthur Fellowship, but, she told me, she was worried that her specialty had lost its Indiana Jones glamour and had become “routine—just another application of evolutionary biology.” She had noted, with approval, Church’s shift away from deëxtinction and toward rewilding, to creating “ proxies for these extinct species . A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo did tell the Associated Press that the work was “technologically pretty cool.” But Nature noted that a Maine research facility has been offering its own long-haired mouse strain, named Wooly, for sale to scientists for the past twenty years.

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