Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean that it should be done.
This seems… hubristic and promethean to me.
At first I thought it was a gag. I guess it isn’t.
SOUND ON. You’re hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years. Meet Romulus and Remus—the world’s first de-extinct animals, born on October 1, 2024.
The dire wolf has been extinct for over 10,000 years. These two wolves were brought back from extinction using… pic.twitter.com/wY4rdOVFRH
— Colossal Biosciences® (@colossal) April 7, 2025
Jurassic Park, anyone?
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I…guess we haven’t read our Victorian fiction? Seems to me this is, basically, what Frankenstein is about. Genetic engineering or reconstruction is not new.
What I would like to see make a comeback is from extinction is the Buick Grand National and square body Chevrolets. I can get behind reviving these things. Animals, I dunno, sounds Jurassic Park to me.
Canis dirus was larger than Canis lupus, but its brain was smaller. That’s the most likely reason it’s extinct.
Why bring back a species that was removed long ago by natural selection?
From the “I’m just going to leave this here” Department: CRISPR cas9 DIY gene-editing kits with fairly robust capabilities (apparently, anyway) can be had for about $349 mail order…
…it’s as good a reason as any to pray without ceasing, as 1 Thessalonians 5 reminds us.
Beasts today; humans tomorrow.
Island of Dr. Moreau, anyone?
Next up for revival: the plague of Justinian
I doubt that this is factual.
I wouldn’t have recreated dire wolves, no.
Since they’re here, they’re here. But they shouldn’t breed them, and they need to keep them away from other canines.
Many movies have been made about this (see Jurassic Park etc), and while the St. Augustine believes that animal souls are perishable, and not capable of surviving death, i feel anything cloned has no soul of any sort. Could be wrong, I leave that to those who have studied that topic.
As much as I want to see a Woolly Mammoth it may not be the wisest thing….
Continuing my education.
I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what a dire wolf was, except for an old song by Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
When I awoke, the dire wolf,
six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window,
all I said was “Come on in”
https://youtu.be/VWY4hyIlsqQ?feature=shared
Don’t murder me,
I beg of you don’t murder me
Please don’t murder me
there’s more than sufficient reason that people moved wolves out of their habitat. to make those wolves much bigger and more fearless is simply insane. no, not as insane as contraception or sociopathic sexual degeneracy, but still insane.
The consequences could be… dire.
*de-extinct protocrickets*
I’ll show myself out…
People really need to refocus their minds and souls.
Learn from the past. Don’t recreate it.
Human IVF is more dire.
And other than man, what natural predators will they have?
And can they breed independently
Another attempt by Satan to ape God. We know how this ends for him.
It’s an established and generally acknowledged fact that it’s a bad idea to introduce a species from one ecosystem into another one that is new to it and that lacks natural predators to control it’s population. For example, walking catfish in Florida, rabbits in Australia, etc.
If introducing a species from a different place is bad, why should we think that introducing a new species from a different time is a good idea?
Someone on another news site commented, more or less literally, “What could go wrong?” and they were serious, adding that even if a few of these wolves escaped to the wild, it would not be a big deal.
They apparently have not paid attention to the growing feral hog crisis, which is destroying millions of dollars of crops. It started as a mostly local infestation in the south, and the hogs have spread all the way to the Canadian border.
What could go wrong, indeed.
Seems creepy to me! Do you know what you might be unleashing on the world?
Did some quick research.
It appears that these wolves ARE NOT dire wolves but gene-edited modern gray wolves — no ancient DNA involved.
Jurassic Park, the book not the movie, also wasn’t bringing back dinosaurs but was creating gene-spliced modern dinosaurs (combination of preserved DNA, gene splices to fix the damaged parts and for modifications) and some host DNA of the modern species’ eggs (they were all female but modern frog DNA allowed them to spontaniously switch sex due to population pressure (no males)). In the book, the hubris is not in the bringing back the dinos, but in thinking that one could control life — life finds a way as Dr. Malcome stated.
Typically, when you are looking at cloning of the Dolly the Sheep variety, you are also looking not at a pure clone but a genetic hybrid as Dolly had the RNA of the egg cell, not the RNA of the original.
—
Certainly, there is some worry about gene editing and splicing mistakes, but we have been doing that for thousands of years via animal husbandry — it just takes longer, and there is less control. No one has qualms about there being mules or the purebred dog that greets you when you come home. The corn that we have for dinner — we made that long before we started gene editing it to be extra sweet and more pest resistant.
We have been modifying, at the genetic level, our food and our animals for thousands of years. It is just the process that has changed, not the what is being done that has changed.
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@tgarcia2
All living things have souls. If it is alive, it has a soul; if not, then not. The little paper mite that is walking across my book has a soul. The book does not have a soul, but it did when it was a tree. Clones have souls in the same way twins have souls. They are different things with genetically the same bodies, so different souls, not shared souls or no souls.
BTW, these are not dire wolves. These are grey wolves genetically modified to look, and possibly act, like dire wolves.
I’m not sure how much DNA was modified, but how much would need to be modified to make a man look like a gorilla, or vice versa?
I’m seeing reports that this is fake.
Breeding canines of any species that stand six foot at the shoulder strikes me as a bad idea. And we haven’t yet worked out how to cope with grey wolves in inhabited areas, so it is at least premature.
Beasts today; humans tomorrow.
Agreed: I don’t really mind gene splicing and stuff in itself. It’s the fact that currently science (and scientists) are out of control and WILL do insane and immoral stuff with human genome, and this contributes to that mind set. Let’s wait until there is a sane and moral convention on gene science before we dabble like this.
Breeding canines of any species that stand six foot at the shoulder strikes me as a bad idea.
These aren’t and dire wolves weren’t that big. They are believed to have run maybe 150 lbs (compared to 132 for a Yukon wolf). The 6′ is standing on its hind legs, not shoulder height standing on all 4 legs.
I would like to meet a woolly mammoth or a dodo (as in bird, met plenty of the other type).
Fortunately, this is a rather grandiose claim. They managed to change about 20 grey wolf genes to mimic features of the extinct direwolf in grey wolf pups.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dire-wolf-back-dead-not-exactly