Colossal Biosciences, the genetic engineering company working to bring back the woolly mammoth, has actually already brought back one of its extinct Ice Age cohabitants: the dire wolf.

The Dallas, Texas-based biotech company revealed Monday the recent successful birth of three dire wolf puppies, a major step in proving the viability of Colossal’s “de-extinction technologies” and its potential use in bringing back other species.

The birth of the dire wolf pups marks the first successfully de-extincted animal, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a press release.

“Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” Lamm said. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”

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Lamm and George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, founded Colossal in 2021 with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth. Since then, the company has expanded its plans to include the de-extinction of the Australian thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and the dodo.

Last month, Colossal revealed it had genetically engineered the Woolly Mouse, which shared some coat characteristics with a woolly mammoth including longer, lighter-colored hair with a rough, woolly texture. “This is a very, very big step for us because it proves that all of the work we’ve been doing for the last three years on the woolly mammoth is exactly what we predicted,” Lamm said at the time.

With the reveal of the dire wolf puppies, Colossal shows “that our end-to-end (de-extinction) toolkit that we talked about with the mouse works, but now it’s working with ancient DNA and it’s been pretty incredible,” Lamm told USA TODAY.

What is a dire wolf?

Many may have first heard of the dire wolf from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of fantasy novels the TV show is based on. (The dire wolf was the sigil, or mascot, of House Stark.) Others may be familiar with the Grateful Dead song, “Dire Wolf.”

Dire wolves have also appeared in video games including Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, tabletop game classic Dungeons & Dragons, and card game Magic the Gathering.

But the dire wolf is an actual real-world predator, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago after roaming North America for thousands of years before that, alongside saber tooth tigers and mastodons.

“Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem,” said George R.R. Martin, who is a Colossal investor and a cultural advisor, in a statement. “I get the luxury to write about magic, but Ben and Colossal have created magic by bringing these majestic beasts back to our world.”

About 25% larger than modern-day gray wolves, dire wolves had thicker, more muscular legs, more powerful shoulders, a wider head and snout with larger jaws and teeth. The dire wolf stood about 3½ feet tall and could be even longer than 6 feet and weigh up to 150 pounds.

Researchers have long been intrigued by the dire wolf because it coexisted with the gray wolf – which did not go extinct – but there hasn’t been enough dire wolf DNA found to analyze. Many dire wolf remains have been found in the La Brea tar pits, for example, but the tar pit damages the DNA, said Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer.

Shapiro and the researchers at Colossal contacted museums and laboratories with dire wolf specimens and got access to a tooth thought to be about 13,000 years old, found in Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old skull from Idaho. Inside the skull is the petrous, or inner ear bone, which is a good source of well-preserved DNA, Shapiro said.

From those two specimens, Shapiro and the team at Colossal recovered enough DNA to create two dire wolf genomes to compare with other canid species including coyotes, jackals, dholes and, of course, other wolves, Shapiro said. Using the genetic data, researchers could confirm the gray wolf as the closest living relative of the dire wolf – they share 99.5% of their DNA code.

Next, the Colossal researchers edited the gray wolf genome in 20 sites over 14 genes to express specific traits of dire wolves including a light colored coat, hair length, coat patterning, along with body size and musculature.

Fertilized dire wolf eggs were implanted into and born by surrogate dog mothers. Two litters have led to a pair of male dire wolves, Romulus and Remus, now six months old, and Khaleesi, a female, born in January. These newcomers are not exact 100% exactly the same dire wolf that roamed the earth ages ago, but look as close to genetic experts could get.

“Their coat is just absolutely amazing. It’s super thick,” said Lamm, describing the wolves, which live on a 2,000-acre ecological preserve in the northern U.S. “They are super friendly because we’ve raised them … (chief animal officer) Matt (James) bottle fed them when they were just young pups. But they are starting to come into their own, where they’re acting more and more like wolves.”

Why bring back the dire wolf from extinction?

Wolves became a focus at Colossal after Lamm and James had a meeting with The MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) Nation in central North Dakota. While talking with the tribal leaders about research on buffalo and bison conservation, “they told us there’s not enough going into wolf conservation,” Lamm said, and began discussing the dire wolf and wolves’ importance to generations of Native Americans.

Soon after that, they met with officials in North Carolina about the state’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, which seeks to increase the population of the one-time extinct animal through breeding in captivity and release of wolves. At about the same time, investors including Peter Jackson and Tom Brady came on board who were “super excited about this business,” Lamm said.

With the dire wolf, Colossal thought “we could do something that could bring awareness from pop culture to science … and we could build technologies to help wolves, which we did in this process, and do something that the indigenous people were really excited about,” Lamm said. “We kind of joke that we didn’t pursue the dire wolf, in a weird way it pursued us.”

The dire wolf is a symbol that “carries the echoes of our ancestors, their wisdom, and their connection to the wild,” said MHA Nation Tribal Chairman Mark Fox in a statement. “Its presence would remind us of our responsibility as stewards of the Earth – to protect not just the wolf, but the delicate balance of life itself.”

During the project to de-extinct the dire wolf, the Colossal researchers developed a cloning shortcut using blood instead of tissue samples from wild coyote-Red Wolf mix wolves, which carry Red Wolf DNA, to birth two litters of Red Wolf puppies. “So we’re able to inject these new genetics into the recovery population in a way that can bolster their adaptive ability,” James said.

Colossal plans to breed more dire wolves and study them and how they act in packs. As of now, there’s no plan for the wolves to breed.

They hope North Carolina is interested in using the company’s technology to bring more Red Wolves into nature, too. Wolves are “critical to ecosystems, they’re helpful to the planet and they’re also an American icon,” Lamm said.

Colossal will soon publish a paper about the ancient DNA used to create the three dire wolves. And the company has kept experts in the field informed about their advances.

“I think for me the most exciting thing about this project is that shows how we can use cutting edge technologies in molecular biology to help protect and preserve populations of animals that are at risk of extinction today,” said Elinor Karlsson, the director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a geneticist who’s a member of Colossal’s advisory board.

“Colossal produced healthy puppies with genetic variants that haven’t existed for over 10,000 years,” she told USA TODAY. “To do this, they innovated new methods for sampling, biobanking and cloning. Their work could will help us preserve genetic diversity that is on the brink of disappearing from earth today, which includes a number of Canidae species,” which includes domestic dogs, foxes, wolves and other mammals.”

“I also appreciate how careful Colossal was in the way they approached this work,” she said. “They prioritized the health and well being of both the dog mothers and the wolf puppies.”

Colossal constantly weighs the ethics of its technology in case readers are worried about something as happened in the movie “Jurassic Park” coming to fruition. “We have spent a lot of time thinking about whether we should (bring back a species),” Shapiro said. “We weren’t just focused on whether we could. We’ve now proven we can.”

The ability to revive and sustain species is important, she said. “We have to keep in mind and understand that there is an incredible risk in the decision not to use these technologies,” Shapiro said. “We know what the consequences of that decision are and it’s an increased rate of extinction throughout the world.”

Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY’s Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him atmikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social  & @mikesnider & [email protected].

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