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.