Is de-extinction a scam? cover art

Is de-extinction a scam?

Is de-extinction a scam?

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Can we bring extinct organisms back to life? Colossal Biosciences caused quite the stir earlier this year when claimed they could do just that, and indeed have done with Dire Wolves - an extinct species of candid from North America. What is going on here? We sense check those claims and ask what they did (and did not do) as well as the broader implications of the science (pseudoscience?) of de-extinction.

The front cover of "Time" magazine - no ambiguity here about what they are saying.

Here is the phylogeny (evolutionary tree) from the paper. Dire wolves have a long branch arising from a point between Jackal/Dog/Dhole/Wolf on the one side and Bush Dog/Maned wolf on the other side.

There was a lot of press about this work, but the paper it comes from is a pre-print "On the ancestry and evolution of the extinct dire wolf" uploaded to BioRxiv in April 2025 by Gregory Gedman and Beth Shapiro of Colossal Biosciences, and colleagues, including George R. R. Martin (!).

Update: the 3 individuals are not technically clones but genetically manipulated grey wolves

https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.09.647074

Widescreen artwork: Colossal Biosciences
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