A $10.2 Billion Startup Says It’s Bringing Back Dire Wolves and Dodos-Scientists Have Questions
From mammoths to dodos, scientists are exploring 'de-extinction.'
A Dallas-based biotech company called Colossal Biosciences says it has produced “de-extinct” dire wolf pups using gene-editing technology, but critics argue the animals are genetically modified gray wolves —not a truly revived species.
What Colossal claims
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2 billion after raising hundreds of millions from investors including Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton, announced in 2024 that it had produced three pups it described as “de-extinct” dire wolves. That species is believed to have disappeared more than 10,000 years ago.
The dire wolf is just the beginning. Colossal says it is also working to revive the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
According to an article posted by The Guardian on March 15, the company’s research is carried out at a 55,000-square-foot facility in northwest Dallas. Scientists there extract ancient DNA from fossils and use CRISPR gene-editing technology to modify the genomes of closely related living species.
CRISPR is a tool that allows scientists to make precise edits to DNA sequences, functioning like a molecular pair of scissors that can cut, remove or replace specific genetic code. Colossal’s researchers use it to alter the DNA of living animals so the offspring express traits associated with their extinct relatives.
How the dire wolf project actually worked
For the dire wolf pups, scientists edited 14 out of roughly 19,000 genes in gray wolf DNA. Those edits produced hybrid offspring with traits associated with dire wolves, including lighter fur color, larger size and greater cold resistance.
That’s 14 genes out of 19,000. The remaining genome is gray wolf. This distinction sits at the center of a heated debate within the scientific community about what “de-extinction” actually means.
Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University at Buffalo, criticized the characterization directly.
“They made genetically modified gray wolves, not dire wolves–to say they are dire wolves is entirely arrogant,” Lynch said. “You can’t put a mutation into a related species and call that thing the extinct thing. You can’t bring things back in the way Colossal are doing it.”
Lynch also challenged the company’s definition of species identity, telling The Guardian: “They say if it looks like the thing then it’s the thing, but we haven’t used that definition for a long time.”
Where the dodo stands
The dodo, a flightless bird driven to extinction by human activity roughly 400 years ago, is one of Colossal’s active projects. Scientists have cultivated primordial germ cells—early precursors to sperm and egg cells—from the pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative.
Researchers are also working with emu eggs in efforts related to reviving the moa, another extinct flightless bird once native to New Zealand. The dodo and moa projects involve a different approach than the dire wolf work, since birds reproduce through eggs rather than live birth, introducing a separate set of biological challenges.
Colossal has said it hopes revived species such as the woolly mammoth, created using gene-edited Asian elephant DNA, could eventually be released into the wild to restore ecological roles such as seed dispersal, predation and carbon storage.
The ‘Jurassic Park’ question
Colossal’s chief executive Ben Lamm doesn’t shy away from the comparison.
“I don’t mind the Jurassic Park comparison because we get it a lot,” he said during his interview with The Guardian.
“Jurassic Park taught a large population of people, including non-scientists, that there’s this thing called DNA and humans now can change it,” Lamm added. “Now, the movie goes terribly wrong because it’s a dystopian movie about hubris. But at the end of the day, I think it did a lot more right than did wrong.”
Lamm framed the company’s work as a response to biodiversity loss. He said the rapid loss of biodiversity has created what he described as a “moral obligation” to explore technological responses to extinction. “Parents in middle America care about conservation and also get excited about science,” he told the outlet.
The scientific pushback
The debate isn’t about whether CRISPR works. It does. The question is whether editing a handful of genes in one species and calling the result a different, extinct species is scientifically honest.
Lynch’s critique centers on the gap between Colossal’s marketing language and what the science actually produced. Editing 14 out of 19,000 genes leaves the vast majority of the genome untouched. The resulting animal shares most of its DNA with the living species, not the extinct one.
Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro responded by arguing that the debate over definitions misses the broader conservation potential of the technology.
“I was surprised by some of the pushback, but if you don’t want to call them a dire wolf, that’s fine, I don’t care,” Shapiro said.
She went further, framing the controversy as a necessary consequence of pushing boundaries. “If you’re not controversial, you’re not pushing hard enough, right?” she said. “If we just stick with what everybody is comfortable with, then we’re just going to keep it with the status quo and we know that the status quo is not good enough.”
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