#and the flagrant disregard for the force of nature and wild animals

[introvertedwolf]

oh my GOD i have so many thoughts on this shit.

first of all, HORRENDOUS marketing. Colossal Biosciences is doing INSANELY scummy shit, and they have tried to "bring back" creatures like woolly mammoths and dodos with no real success. i'd bet my bottom dollar they're trying to use this language for this project as a "proof of concept" to sell to investors, because THEY DID NOT DO SHIT.

they edited, by their own admission, 14 total genes, making 20 changes between them, using CRISPR technology (which is entirely it's own mess of a situation and probably doesnt give us the degree of control its usually sold as, but thats an entirely different can of worms)

but i need to make it clear. MOST OF THOSE CHANGES. WERE TO COLOR. other changes were to ear size, body size, and fur texture.

THEY MADE TIMBER WOLVES. THAT ARE WHITE. AND CALLING THEM DIRE WOLVES.

and if that wasn't bad enough, Dire Wolf were Not related to wolves. they're not in the same genus. dire wolves are most closely related to african jackals and african painted dogs than anything else currently alive. theyre more closely related to my niche canine blorbo The Dhole than any extant wolf species, particularly north american ones.

and lets be clear, even with jackals being the most related currently alive species, jackals are still more closely related to timber wolves than either one is to the dire wolf.

there are LITERALLY MILLIONS of genes worth of difference between grey wolves and jackals, and millions MORE between jackal and dire wolf. and they edited FOURTEEN. and CALLED IT A DIRE WOLF.

dire wolf were only Called that because they had similar skeletal shapes and pack hunting behavior, but currently we think they'd look more like a jackal or coyote than anything else. and reconstructing COLOR? spending MOST OF YOUR EDITS ON COLOR? this is not at all what a direwolf would look like, even remotely, and it CERTAINLY wont tell us anything about how they BEHAVED.

they make claims about how they want to release these animals into the wild (to their "rightful place" as their website says), but the ecological niche that dire wolf filled no longer exists. dire wolf are a species of megafauna, who specialized in hunting other megafauna. the only living species of megafauna is moose, and modern timber wolves, bear and humans are known for hunting those just fine. if you released a dire wolf into the north american wilds, it would compete with endangered timber wolves for resources.

its one thing to save a species from wild extinction that experienced it recently, where its niche was not otherwise filled, but wolves DID fill that niche. introducing a dire wolf at this point would have the same issues as introducing an invasive species. this was not a species that RECENTLY went extinct in the wild. there is no longer space to support an animal like a dire wolf in the wild.

they say they're "committed to transparency," but they refused to release the 2 complete dire wolf genomes they used to splice into the pups DNA. when it comes to welfare, they've refused to explain what species of surrogate they used (most speculate it was a domestic dog) or what care conditions for those are/were.

this is a flagrant marketing ploy, its total BS.

and not for nothing, the Colossal Biosciences website uses AI generated images.

this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said "these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit".