Scientists have announced the first de-extinction of an animal species, reintroducing the dire wolf back into the world.
Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering company, birthed three dire wolves, naming them Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi in honor of the legendary creature made famous from the HBO hit series Game of Thrones.
However, the white-coated wolf once roamed North and South America before vanishing around 12,000 years ago likely to the disappearance of their prey.
The company extracted DNA from fossilized remains, which was combined with the genetic code of a gray wolf, the closest living relative.
Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a statement: ‘Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies.’
The team then cloned high-quality cell lines using somatic cell nuclear transfer into donor egg cells, which involves taking the DNA out of the cell from a donor – in this case a body cell.
The embryos were then transferred to a surrogate, which gave birth to the three healthy pups in October 2024.
The wolves are thriving on a more than 2,000-acre secure expansive ecological preserve in the US.
Scientists have announced the world’s first de-extinction of an animal species, reintroducing the dire wolf back into the environment
The company extracted DNA from fossilized remains, which was combined with the genetic code of a gray wolf, the closest living relative
Colossal made headlines last month when it created a ‘woolly mouse’ by engineering rodents to grow thick, warm coats using mammoth DNA.
However, the company’s the ultimate goal is to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinctions. It plans on reviving the creature by late 2028.
For the dire wolves, scientists extracted ancient DNA from two fossils: a tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, that is around 13,000 years old, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, around 72,000 years old.
The DNA was then sequenced and reassembled using Colossal’s novel approach, resulting in a 3.4-fold coverage genome from the tooth and 12.8-fold coverage genome from the inner ear bone.
‘Together, this data provided more than 500x more coverage of the dire wolf genome than was available previously,’ Colossal said.
Dr Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s Chief Science Officer, said: ‘Our novel approach to iteratively improve our ancient genome in the absence of a perfect reference sets a new standard for paleogenome reconstruction.
‘Together with improved approaches to recover ancient DNA, these computational advances allowed us to resolve the evolutionary history of dire wolves and establish the genomic foundation for de-extinction – specifically for selecting with confidence dire wolf specific genetic variants that establish our targets for gene editing.’
Based on Colossal’s genomic analysis, the team used gray wolves as the donor species for establishing cell lines.
The team edited 15 extinct dire wolf variants into the donor gray wolf genome, creating dire wolves that express genes that have not been expressed for more than 10,000 years.
The team then cloned high-quality cell lines using somatic cell nuclear transfer into donor egg cells, which involves taking the DNA out of the cell from a donor – in this case a body cell
Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering company, birthed three dire wolves, naming them Romulus (right), Remus (left) and Khaleesi in honor of the legendary creature made famous from the HBO hit series Game of Thrones
Healthy developing embryos were then transferred into surrogates for interspecies gestation.
Three pregnancies led to births of the first de-extinct species.
Dr Christopher Mason, a scientific advisor and member of the board of observers for Colossal, said: ‘The de-extinction of the dire wolf and an end-to-end system for de-extinction is transformative and heralds an entirely new era of human stewardship of life.
‘The same technologies that created the dire wolf can directly help save a variety of other endangered animals as well.
‘This is an extraordinary technological leap in genetic engineering efforts for both science and for conservation as well as preservation of life, and a wonderful example of the power of biotechnology to protect species, both extant and extinct.’
Dire wolves were as much as 25 percent larger than gray wolves and had a slightly wider head, light thick fur and stronger jaw.
As hyper-carnivores, their diet comprised at least 70 percent meat from mostly horses and bison.
Dire wolves went extinct at the end of the most recent ice age, around 13,000 years ago.
Colossal Biosciences announced it has raised $200 million in a new round of funding in January, which it plans to use for de-extincting the woolly mammoth.
Scientists aren’t exactly sure why they disappeared from the planet, but theories include a shifting climate, overhunting or a combination of both.
But Lamm said he’s ‘positive’ the first woolly mammoth calves will be born in the next few years.
‘Our recent successes in creating the technologies necessary for our end-to-end de-extinction toolkit have been met with enthusiasm by the investor community,’ Lamm said in a statement.
‘This funding will grow our team, support new technology development, expand our de-extinction species list while continuing to allow us to carry forth our mission to make extinction a thing of the past.’
Colossal, now valued at $10.2 billion, has already sequenced a mammoth genome and found a way to produce elephant stem cells capable of giving rise to several different cell types — two important steps toward resurrecting the mammoth.
The embryos were then transferred to a surrogate , which gave birth to the three healthy pups in October 2024
The wolves are thriving on a more than 2,000-acre secure expansive ecological preserve in the US. Picture of Colossal’s Dire Wolves; Romulus and Remus at age three months
All that remains is the gene editing process to add the targeted mammoth genes into elephant DNA, according to the company.
‘We’ve set one timeline which is late 2028 for the first mammoth calves and we are currently on track for that,’ Lamm previously told DailyMail.com.
To understand how Colossal’s de-extinction process works, Lamm said you can think of it as ‘reverse Jurassic Park.’
In the classic films, scientists bring back dinosaurs by recovering ancient DNA frozen within amber, then using genes taken from frogs to patch the holes in the dino DNA.
But, unlike those fictional scientists, the researchers at Colossal Biosciences are actually working backward.
‘We’re not taking mammoth DNA and plugging in the holes, we’re trying to engineer the lost genes from mammoths into Asian elephants,’ Lamm said.
Asian elephants are more closely related to woolly mammoths than African elephants. They share 95 percent of their genetic code with the extinct giants.
By studying the differences between the Asian elephant genome and the woolly mammoth genome, Colossal scientists have identified ‘target genes’ that essentially determine whether an organism becomes an elephant or a mammoth.
Thanks to advances in gene editing techniques like CRISPR, scientists can now take those target genes and plug them directly into the DNA of modern elephants.
For example, they can take the ancient gene that makes mammoths produce their woolly coats and inject it into an Asian elephant’s DNA.
‘You can think of DNA being like a twisted ladder with each little rung being a base pair,’ Lamm said.
‘We are able to change each rung of the ladder, but now we also have the ability to engineer new pieces of the ladder that we want to be there.’
The resulting elephant-mammoth hybrid DNA can then be used to create ‘pluripotent stem cells,’ a type of cell that has the potential to become any kind of tissue.
