Here's all you need to be gravely skeptical of the "resurrected" dire wolf claim.

They are not even close to dire wolves, and the company is acting very unscientifically.

The same damn photo everyone is using on their articles about this

As you have no doubt seen in the news all week, a private company called Colossal Biosciences has blanketed the world media with press releases claiming to have brought back the extinct dire wolf, and just about every news outlet on the planet uncritically ran with the story, lauding the great achievement. Everyone’s been sharing it on their social media and making all kinds of philosophical arguments about the morality of this, because they saw Jurassic Park and that’s what you’re supposed to do. Only now are we beginning to see the response from the science community, and it’s not good.

Colossal is a private, for-profit company that (in my observation) makes outrageous claims about all the extinct species they’re going to bring back, and as a result has successfully raised insane amounts of investment capital and secured all kinds of celebrity supporters. And what they’ve done now to please this tech-bro crowd is to breed three grey wolf cubs that are tweaked to kind of look like dire wolves, but genetically remain regular grey wolves.

The dire wolf was a large predatory canid, roughly similar in appearance to a modern wolf, that went extinct at the end of the last ice age, along with many of the world’s megafauna, as the environment changed too quickly for them to adapt.

Here is what modern wolves and dire wolves share: they are both carnivores of the family Canidae. They’re both canids, and that’s the limit of what they share. Canids are a diverse group that includes wolves, foxes, jackals, raccoon dogs, short-eared dogs, coyotes, and many more. Very few of these species can interbreed. Grey wolves and dire wolves last shared a common ancestor about 5.6-5.7 million years ago. Dire wolves branched off, evolved independently, and eventually became extinct; they have no living descendants today. They are not ancestors of the grey wolf.

In fact they are not even the same genus! A dire wolf is:

Carnivora > Canidae > Canini > Canina > Aenocyon dirus

A grey wolf is:

Carnivora > Canidae > Canis lupus

What this means is you cannot, no way no how, splice a few genes in a grey wolf and get a dire wolf. Colossal says they have a complete dire wolf genome, yet they’ve not shown it to anyone (as of this writing). They say the two species share 99.5% of their DNA. That’s a lot; it’s more than humans and chimps (98.8%) but much less than diverse members of the same species, like Great Danes and Chihuahuas (100.0%). At 99.5%, out of some 2.4 billion base pairs, there are about 12 million genetic differences. Colossal’s scientists made 20 changes.

So whatever they made is not even in the same universe as a dire wolf. From fossils and frozen specimens preserved in permafrost, we know a great deal about the morphology and appearance of a dire wolf. What Colossal did was simply to tweak a grey wolf with known genes that will produce similar physical traits. They made a grey wolf tweaked to kind of look like a dire wolf, using traits that are within the normal range of variation for grey wolves. They selected for larger size, thicker legs, a white or light coat, robust musculature, and a wider head with a larger sagittal crest. Dire wolves were only slightly larger and heavier than the biggest grey wolves; they were nothing at all like the monsters in Game of Thrones in case that’s your reference point.

So that’s about all on their little puppies; now let’s talk about the company Colossal and their business model — and how it seems ominously similar to another you may have heard of: Theranos.

Theranos was a company that promised revolutionary blood testing, in a way that anyone who had any subject matter expertise knew was clearly implausible at best and more likely impossible. This promise attracted investors with zero knowledge of blood testing including The Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, Larry Ellison, Carlos Slim — and of course all the usual Silicon Valley tech bros and venture capitalists. They failed to do any due diligence, and all lost their money because Theranos never had any plan to do what they promised.

Colossal’s investors also seem to be people with little knowledge of genetics or the problems of reviving extinct species: celebs like Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, Peter Jackson, and Chris Hemsworth; and then the same list of Silicon Valley tech bros and venture capitalists, all enthused at the prospect of seeing a living woolly mammoth. And few of whom, I’ll wager, have done the most basic due diligence of asking, say, a geneticist or microbiologist.

Colossal’s investors have poured in $435 million so far, with the latest round of investments giving them a valuation of $10.2 billion. A ten billion dollar valuation; they promise to do something many geneticists will say is not very plausible, and all they’ve done so far is make some wolf puppies bred to look slightly different.

The investor list is a red flag to me, but it’s not necessarily a bad start. What concerns me more than their investor list is the way they’ve been waving all the red flags of pseudoscience.

• First, good science is published in peer-reviewed journals. Colossal has not published this, and has made no mention of planning to do so (that I have been able to find). Only after it has passed peer review and been published is good science announced to the media.

• Bad science, conversely, tends to follow the “publish it straight to the mass media” model, which is exactly what Colossal has done. Here’s a graphic they have on their website:

That’s the last thing I want to see on the website of a company that does good science. This is consistent with fundraising, not with good science.

What Colossal did with these grey wolf pups is not a step in the direction of actually reviving an extinct species; it was a PR stunt. In Skeptoid #312 I explained part of the problem with bringing back a woolly mammoth, which is the frontispiece of Colossal’s model:

It's a really difficult problem. Getting DNA of high enough quality is only a part of the solution, even though it receives the most attention. When we discover a new frozen mammoth corpse, there's always excitement and speculation about recovering its DNA. And we have plenty of it, but that's just gets us across the starting line. The DNA has to be nearly perfect, and then molecular biologists must manually create the 50 to 60 different chromosomes that elephants have. That's a huge project. Once you have a cell nucleus containing all the chromosomes, you can then replace the contents of the nucleus of a living elephant embryo, but you'll probably have to do this about 100 times before one will survive.

Healthy clones are even harder to make. Most artificially cloned animals have died early. Scientists in Spain once cloned an extinct goat, using genetic material extracted while the last surviving specimen was still alive, which allowed them to skip much of the tedious work that awaits mammoth cloners. However, the goat died after only a few minutes.

It will probably be done sooner or later, but the smart money is on later.

I really hope Colossal is not another Theranos. But it’s not looking good to me so far.