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SUNDAY SCIENCE: DIRE WOLVES AND WOOLLY MAMMOTHS: WHY SCIENTISTS ARE
WORRIED ABOUT DE-EXTINCTION  
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Rachel Nuwer
April 25, 2025
BBC
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_ The creation of three "dire wolf" pups has raised hopes that it may
be possible to resurrect extinct animals. But some scientists have
grave concerns. _

, Colossal Biosciences

 

When news broke that Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based
biotechnology company, had resurrected three extinct dire wolves
[[link removed]], the internet
reacted with awe. It is a species that last roamed the earth some
13,000 years ago, but has found recent fame thanks to Game of Thrones,
which features fictional dire wolves.

The story was stoked further when a photograph of Game of Thrones
author George R R Martin holding one of the adorable white pups was
released. "I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as
no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong on the moon," Martin
wrote on his blog
[[link removed]].

Martin, who is an investor in Colossal, added that more extinct
species were on the way, including the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger
and dodo. 

Colossal – which is currently valued at $10bn (£7.6bn) and is
backed by high-profile donors such as Chris Hemsworth, Paris Hilton
and the CIA – boldly states on its website that it's "going to fix"
the problem of extinction.

According to Matt James, the company's chief animal officer, the aim
is not to create a Jurassic Park-like zoo full of extinct animals, but
to reintroduce lost species back into the habitats they once occupied.
Once those animals are settled in, Colossal expects them to exert
positive change on their habitats. "We're trying to focus on species
that can have cascading effects on an ecosystem to improve stability,
lift biodiversity and maybe even help with climate change buffering,"
James tells the BBC.  

De-extinction has been talked about for decades
[[link removed]].
But Colossal's three dire wolves – which are actually grey wolves
[[link removed]] that possess 20
edited genes that are meant to give them dire wolf-like features –
represent the most serious effort to date to make that lofty vision a
reality.

In the wake of the dire wolf announcement, however, many scientists
have criticised Colossal's approach. They see efforts to bring back
long-extinct species as costly wastes of resources and a distraction
from the significant work that's needed to save still-living species.

The BBC spoke with several experts in fields ranging from conservation
biology to paleontology about efforts to resurrect species from
extinction and whether they are likely to achieve the goals that
Colossal hopes.

The announcement that Colossal had genetically altered three wolf
puppies to give them dire wolf traits made headlines around the world
(Credit: Colossal Biosciences)

Chief among the concerns raised was that claiming it is possible to
bring back extinct species may actually lead to more existing species
being lost. It could give politicians and industries the idea that
damage to the environment can be fixed by resurrecting species.

Such a message could be particularly damaging at a time when the US is
withdrawing from international agreements on climate change
[[link removed]] and revoking
measures
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the environment and wildlife
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says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and independent
consultant based in Washington, DC.

"It's beyond irresponsible for these people to be claiming some sort
of conservation victory in this environment," he says.

This worry was quickly reinforced when Doug Burgum, the US Secretary
of the Interior – who the Colossal team met with in advance of their
dire wolf announcement – praised the company's work
[[link removed]] on X as a
new "bedrock for modern species conservation". Burgum also criticised
the ineffectiveness of the "endangered species list" – presumably a
reference to the Red List of Threatened Species
[[link removed]], drawn up by the International Union of
Conservation (IUCN) or the list of threatened & endangered species
maintained by branches of the US Government – thanks to what he
characterised as a focus on regulation. "Since the dawn of our nation,
it has been innovation – not regulation – that has spawned
American greatness," he wrote.

SUPER-COOL SCIENCE

Biodiversity is under a seemingly endless onslaught of threats,
virtually all of which are imposed by humans. The leading
reasons, according to the IUCN
[[link removed]], are habitat destruction,
invasive species, overexploitation from fishing and hunting, illegal
wildlife trade, pollution and climate change.

Colossal claims that its de-extinction work will directly benefit
conservation [[link removed]]. But the company
needs to tie its work to "ameliorating, alleviating or reversing
something that's on that list" of threats to biodiversity, says Kent
Redford, former director of the Wildlife Conservation Society who now
works as an independent conservation consultant in Portland, Maine.

While Colossal's de-extinction work is "super-cool science," he
continues, he does not see it alleviating any of the threats
highlighted by the IUCN.

Colossal sees things otherwise. The company states on its website that
woolly mammoths reintroduced to the Arctic, for example, will increase
those habitats' resilience to climate change
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which they say will help to keep carbon locked in permafrost in the
ground. By scraping away snow, the company says, mammoths will expose
the soil below to cold air, causing it to stay frozen. 

However, Nitin Sekar, a conservation scientist with the Asian elephant
specialist group at the IUCN, says he has struggled to find evidence
in the scientific literature to support this claim. One study
comparing carbon storage in the Arctic tundra to taiga forest
[[link removed]] found
the soil in areas covered in trees could store nearly twice as much
carbon overall. Only slightly more was found in the permafrost of the
tundra than in the taiga. Nor could he find anything else about how
mammoths might have affected carbon in general.

Some research on existing species of arctic herbivores suggests that
they can reduce permafrost thawing
[[link removed]].
One scoping study by researchers at the University of Oxford does
point to the role mammoths had on the climate during the Pleistocene
and suggests bison and horses
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replicate some of that role. But those species need to be maintained
at high densities
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are fenced, fed and managed by humans – to have any protective
effect. The Arctic ecosystem is also different today
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the Pleistocene, so it is also hard to say whether mammoth hybrids
would have that same effect on today's landscape as species like
caribou and reindeer.

There could be other ways that mammoths affect carbon levels. As
temperatures increase, the act of trampling and scraping away snow
could actually accelerate permafrost melting by exposing it to the Sun
– an effect that some research suggests
[[link removed]] is
already happening in wet lowlands in the Arctic. 

"Overall, with the data we have now, it's just impossible to know how
mammoths affected their environment millennia ago, or how the
mammoth-elephant hybrids will behave in our warmer future," Sekar
says. "It seems like a strange thing to gamble on in the face of an
existential crisis, given the alternatives." 

James calls for more research to resolve these questions and show
"direct links and causation in a way that can help to bring the rest
of the scientific community along on this journey".

Dire wolves and woolly mammoths were driven extinct by the complex
forces of a changing planet, not just by human activities. For species
that humans are responsible for annihilating, though, simply bringing
them back does not help to address the threats that pushed them to
extinction in the first place, says Corinne Kendall, programme
director for Southern Africa at the Peregrine Fund, a non-profit
organisation that aims to conserve birds of prey around the world.

Modern conservationists recognise this and are increasingly focused on
landscape-level solutions rather than saving a particular favourite
species, Kendall adds.

"That's what's missing in the way Colossal is approaching this," she
says. "If you only address the genetics and technology side of things,
it's interesting from a scientific discovery standpoint, but you're
creating the trees without the forest."

I think the conservation work that Colossal is doing is far more
important than the de-extinction work – Julie Meachen

Julie Meachen, a vertebrate paleontologist and morphologist at Des
Moines University in Iowa, believes, however, that the genetic
techniques Colossal used to create its dire wolves are applicable to
conservation. The company is also exploring ways to help still-living
species such as the northern white rhino, elephants and endangered
pigeons [[link removed]], she points out. "These
techniques could be applied to any species suffering from genetic
diversity loss and to combat inbreeding or genetic bottlenecks in low
population sizes," she says.

"I think the conservation work that Colossal is doing is far more
important than the de-extinction work, but this conservation work does
not get the same press coverage as the flashy de-extinction part," she
adds. "That is unfortunate."

James at Colossal agrees that de-extinction technologies are just "one
piece of a very complex puzzle" that must also include things like
habitat protection. But he says that attention-grabbing headlines
about extinct species being brought back to life can act like "a giant
ship" pulling "all these other projects in its wake". 

NATURE AND NURTURE

It is also important to be clear about what Colossal is actually able
to achieve. It is unlikely to ever be possible to truly resurrect
long-gone species like dire wolves or woolly mammoths, say scientists
not involved with the company. Tissue samples from animals that have
been extinct for tens of thousands of years lack the intact cells
needed for traditional cloning techniques, says Jacquelyn Gill, a
paleoecologist at the University of Maine. "What Colossal is engaging
in is genetic modification of modern species to give them physical
characteristics to make them look like extinct species." 

This in itself is a significant technical achievement, argues Colossal
and its supporters.

In the case of the dire wolves, the three puppies it managed to breed
are in reality "genetically modified grey wolves
[[link removed]]", say researchers.
Essentially the genome of modern wolves was edited to replicate small
segments of ancient DNA obtained from the fossilised remains of dire
wolves. They are, the company admits, grey wolves with dire wolf
characteristics.

But scientists have even questioned some of those characteristics.It's
unlikely, for example, that dire wolves would have been white, but
Colossal chose to make its animals white "because of popular
conceptions from Game of Thrones", Gill says. "This was an aesthetic
choice, not a biological or scientific one."

Even if Colossal did bring back animals that very closely resembled
Ice Age species, they still would not be the same as the bona fide
ones that lived thousands of years ago because the Pleistocene
ecosystem they inhabited no longer exists, Meachen says. "A dire wolf
or any other species is not only its genes, but also its environment
and all the other species living there."

Wooly mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years and in the
meantime the environment they lived in has changed dramatically
(Credit: Alamy)

Colossal says it has no plans of releasing dire wolves into the wild.
But it does aspire to eventually repopulate parts of the Arctic with
woolly mammoths. This would require engineering a lot of baby mammoth
proxies, which the company plans to do by using Asian or African
elephants as surrogates.

In the West especially, though, some people are starting to question
the ethics of whether elephants – extremely intelligent, social and
sentient beings – should be kept in captivity at all
[[link removed]], much less be experimented
on, Sekar says. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities also
frequently suffer from infertility and lose their calves
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stillbirths and infanticides twice as often as elephants in semi-wild
conditions, he says, while mothers deeply mourn dead calves
[[link removed]]. "Are we
really ok putting elephants through that so we can have these visually
entertaining animals that aren't even real mammoths?" asks Sekar.

James says that Colossal will have many quality control steps to
ensure things go well for the elephants, and that the company will
also be working with leading animal welfare experts to "avoid
potential welfare pitfalls ahead". 

LACK OF RETURNS

Colossal has not disclosed how much it invested in the dire wolf
programme – but it's likely in the many millions of dollars. While
costs of new technologies do eventually go down with scale, even if
de-extinction does get cheaper, it will still be orders of magnitude
more affordable and effective to stop species from going extinct in
the first place, Shiffman says. Moreover, if the original drivers of
extinction are not addressed, then de-extinct species could quickly
become re-extinct, he warns.

If you only address the genetics and technology side of things, you're
creating the trees without the forest – Corinne Kendall

While Redford acknowledges that money is not fungible, if Colossal's
primary goal really is conservation, then he says he has a hard time
viewing its work on de-extinction as being "the right investment to
make".

For every extinct species that Colossal is bringing back, however,
James says the company is also investing in a surviving endangered
species. Work is being done to introduce greater genetic diversity to
populations of endangered red wolves in the US, for example, and to
engineer elephants to be resistant to herpes virus. 

But while red wolves do have some issues with genetic diversity,
their biggest threats
[[link removed]] are road
collisions and human persecution
[[link removed]], Kendall says.
Without addressing "how the animal is going to survive on the ground",
the genetic component becomes "kind of irrelevant". 

Herpes also only kills a fraction of the number of wild Asian
elephants each year compared to those killed by humans, says Sekar, ,
who has reviewed data from the Indian government about causes of
elephant deaths. Around two wild elephants are known to die per year
of herpes compared to around 100 killed in some way by humans, he
says. 

Colossal could leverage its synthetic biology expertise in ways that
are clear wins for the planet, experts say. Crops that are engineered
to more efficiently take up nitrogen, for example, could be a huge
boon for reducing the steep climate costs of nitrogen fertiliser and
lessening the major dead zones that its runoffs cause in water bodies.
Finding ways to engineer high quality animal proteins for human
consumption
[[link removed]] could,
likewise, be a game-changer for alleviating the many environmental and
animal welfare concerns that plague the livestock industry, the
experts say. 

"Colossal clearly has very talented biologists on their team," Sekar
says. "If they were to turn their attention to addressing problems
like that, they could really be the heroes of conservation."

_RACHEL NUWER is an independent American journalist and author of the
2018 nonfiction book Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife
Trafficking (Da Capo Press). She has covered the issue of poaching
from the perspectives of criminals, activists and science for years in
prominent publications, including the Smithsonian, BBC Future, The New
York Times, and National Geographic._

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__

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April 27, 2025

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* extinction
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