April 18, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

The (not) de-extinct dire wolf: Metaphors, myths and magic

This post is a collaboration between Brigitte Nerlich and Kate Roach, both retired social scientists with interests in science, culture and society.

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I (Brigitte) first heard about the dire wolf in a post by the science writer Carl Zimmer linking to an article he had written for the New York Times. I had never heard of dire wolves before, to my shame. So, I started to read the article and I thought “oh, ok, so we had woolly mice as part of a silly de-extinction project and now we have woolly wolves”. I assumed that the whole thing would blow over in a puff of science hype. But that was not so. Puff the magic wolf was here to stay.

With huge fanfare and publicity, a company called Colossal Biosciences, Inc had announced on 7 April, that it had created “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal” which they claimed to be a dire wolf. This sparked a lot of discussion online and offline, including between Kate, who knows a lot about wolves, and me, who doesn’t. The whole thing also spilled over into American politics, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claiming that de-extinction is a viable conservation strategy and that the “dire Wolf revival carries profound cultural significance as it embodies strength and courage that is deeply encoded within the DNA of American identity and tribal heritage”… 

In this post, Kate and I will discuss both the perceived magic of DNA and the long-standing myths surrounding wolves, which merged in the dire wolf announcement. As Jonathan Roberts astutely said: “The dire wolf was a shrewd choice as it inhabits a duality: both real and fantasy”!

The dire wolf

As I said above, I had never heard of the dire wolf, I also had not watched Games of Thrones, an American fantasy drama TV series, which apparently made the extinct creature famous. I had heard however of woolly mammoths, sabre toothed tigers, dodos, all sorts of extinct creatures (and I got the socks to prove it – see featured image).

What I should have known was that dire wolves were large dog-like animals that evolved in North America, and went extinct about 13,000 years ago. That’s much earlier than woolly mammoths, which became extinct recently – about 4000 years ago. Grey wolves, by contrast, did not become extinct and we still have them around (sometimes literally, see photo of Kate and friend)! In fact, dire wolves and grey wolves are, it seems, distinct species that last shared a common ancestor around 5.7 million years ago, with dire wolves evolving in the Americas and grey wolves in Eurasia (see here). So, why would one want the dire wolves back?

De-extinction

In 1990 Michael Crichton set the scene for de-extinction with a bestselling novel entitled Jurassic Park, a fictional speculation about bringing dinosaurs back to life. This was followed by many film adaptations, and Jurassic Park became a cultural icon that had a lasting impact on popular culture. After the Colossal announcement, an ironic article in The Guardian exclaimed: “It’s like Jurassic Park come to life!”. 

In 1996 we had Dolly the cloned sheep, followed in 2003 by the briefly de-extincted Pyrenean ibex, a wild goat species, through cloning. From 2008 onwards the field of de-extinction research gathered momentum with developments of CRISPR gene editing opening up new technical possibilities. One of the driving forces behind all this was George Church a renowned geneticist who launched the woolly mammoth revival project and later cofounded Colossal Biosciences which created woolly mice and now the dire wolf. Why that wolf?

The choice was in part determined by fiction! According to Ben Lamm, a Colossal Biosciences CEO: “dire wolves are top-line talent in pop culture. They aren’t just in ‘Game of Thrones.’ Dire wolves have starring roles in the video game World of Warcraft, the collectible-card game Magic: The Gathering, and the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Lamm added that the Grateful Dead even have a song called ‘Dire Wolf.’ Colossal scientists began working on birthing a dire wolf in the summer of 2023.”

What happened next? Scientists at Colossal retrieved DNA from ancient dire wolf remains (13,000 and 70,000 years old) and sequenced up to 91% of the dire wolf genome. Using CRISPR, they they made 20 changes to 14 genes in grey wolf cells to resemble dire wolf DNA, then inserted the modified DNA into dog ova with their genetic material removed. After implanting approximately 360 engineered embryos into eight surrogate dogs, they successfully produced three healthy wolf pups—two males and one female (see this article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

They named the pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi; Romulus and Remus after the founders of Rome who were nurtured by a wolf mother; Khaleesi after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones often called Khaleesi, a strong female character but not a wolf.

The general consensus amongst scientists online seems to be that Colossal’s de-extinction claim is more hype and fiction than reality. But the announcement made a big media splash. 

Media reactions

First out were three long articles with rather hyperbolic headlines that some critics called ‘client journalism’: “The return of the dire wolf” in Time Magazine; “The dire wolf is back” in The New Yorker; and slightly more hedged: “Scientists revive the dire wolf, or something close” in The New York Times by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer announced his article on Bluesky by saying clearly “It’s not a dire wolf. It’s a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits.” The headline and some section headings, such as “Recipe for a dire wolf” could have been better chosen though, as they smack of genetic essentialism. 

This was immediately picked up by other science writers. The philosopher of science John S. Wilkins pointed out on his blog Evolving Thoughts that “No it’s not a dire wolf. Genes do not make the essence of a species“, while the science writer Philip Ball said on Bluesky: “The not-dire wolf is of course primarily just a PR invention, but perhaps it is also a good opportunity to think about the talismanic magical powers that get attributed to genes.” Combine the magic of genes with the magic powers of wolves and you get a heady mythical mix. 

Many more science commentators joined the debate and expressed their scepticism (see here and here and here and here and here and many more; and more debate was sparked by a pre-print). 

In the following I’ll look at some of the metaphors science communicators used to clarify what’s going on and to dampen down the hype. After that I’ll hand over to Kate Roach who will move from discussing the magical power of genes to discussing the magical power of wolves.

Metaphors and analogies

Metaphors are essential in science communication, as they generate understanding by mapping what’s known or familiar onto what’s less known and less familiar – they can be used to clarify but also to confuse. For example Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s Chief Scientist, said in an interview quoted in Zimmers’ article: “We’re creating these functional copies of something that used to be alive”. 

Copies! We know copies from photocopying papers or copies of books etc. But since 1996 and the advent of cloning, we have also heard of ‘copies’ of animals and even humans, something that, at the time, created a lot of alarm. But what is a metaphor to most of us is a jargon term to scientists. In this case it confuses rather than clarifies. The metaphors, analogies and other rhetorical tools that I’ll be talking about try to de-confuse the extinction hype.

So, we got people talking for example about “Crying wolf on de-extinction”, using a well-known phrase (with the word wolf in it!) meaning to raise a false alarm, to stress that “reports of dire wolf de-extinction have been greatly exaggerated”. Others used metaphors and analogies to clarify the science behind the hype.

Ran Blakhman, a genomics expert, pointed out: “The reason biologists in your timeline are furious by this PR: the idea that species that diverged millions of years ago have only 20 genetic differences defies the fundamental principles of evolution. Like saying you turned a Honda Civic into a Formula 1 car by changing the oil”. This echoes the non-metaphorical question asked by Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute: “Would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human?”

And genes, of course, only exist in a body and that body only exists in an environment so Don, an expert in parasites, wrote: “An animal is more than just their DNA. They are ecosystems themselves. Each species has unique parasites and microbes. Bringing back a dire wolf but none of their parasites or microbiome is like bringing back a tree and claiming we’ve restored a forest. A forest is more than the trees.” Don’t forget, wolves live in packs…

Claims of de-extinction were more directly questioned through this analogy used in a rather scathing article by the biodiversity expert Rich Grenyer: “It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short French man to wear his hat”. In a YouTube video Hank Green used a long metaphor of jenga blocks (from 4.50 minutes in), which I can’t summarise here, but it makes a good point about why we can’t really talk about de-extinction.

David Mitchell, a musician, asked a wider question about the motives of the company by using an apt mapping of an older overhyped technology onto this newer one: “‘De-extinction’ is the ‘carbon capture and storage’ of ecology: a glitzy techy always-in-the-future promise meant to distract from having to do anything meaningful or disruptive today.” 

Adam Rutherford, one of the most vocal critics of this whole enterprise, also used an extended analogy to explain why tweaking a few genes doesn’t maketh a wolf, even a dire one. 

“I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you. Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.”

And finally, Samuel Gorovitz, an expert in medical ethics, told ABC New: “All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures”. 

Metaphors and analogies do a good job at clarifying some contentious issues around the de-extinction claims. However, they might not go far enough, as they don’t deal with the deep narrative roots of stories about wolves, including dire ones. Here we find, not only metaphors, but myths and magic. Against that background one can then ask again: Why de-extinct a wolf?

Myth and Magic

Wolves, dire and otherwise, are some of the most mythologised of all animals and the most iconic of all shapeshifters. Werewolves are a product of a temporary, sometimes cyclical, transformation of human to wolf, which is often (but not always) the result of a curse or punishment following some transgression. Such legends have their roots in Greco-Roman cultures and were described by the Greek ‘father of history’, Herodotus in 425BC. 

One of the earliest versions of the full-blown monstrous werewolf recognisable to modern readers appears in Ovid’s re-telling of the story of the King of Arcadia, Lycaon (approx 8AD). This speaks to a cultural perception of the (were)wolf as a deeply pernicious being. Although the namesakes of two of Colossal’s dire wolf pups, Romulus and Remus (~4AD) tell of another story in which the wolf turns human protector.   

The notion of a malign wolf seems to have been attractive to those with Christian sensibilities and it is inherent in many wolf and werewolf tales since the Greco-Roman period. Indeed, an element of shame lurks among those who become infected with lycanthropy probably because of an association between wolf and devil. The relics of such shame are even stamped upon Harry Potter’s poor old Professor Lupin, whose dark secret is hidden at great length for much of his stay at Hogwarts. Werewolves were witches’ horses, the children of Dracula, the aspiration of many an ambitious shapeshifter, and all are voracious killers that rip the living daylights out of any other life they may meet. 

Grey wolves and dire wolves are apex predators that must kill with brute force crushing, ripping and biting. They have nothing but their teeth and a very strong jaw to live by. Their claws are not retractable which means they are unable to immobilise and then kill their prey in the way that felines are able to. This gives a wolf kill a particularly gory and distressing edge to watch. These qualities speak to the sheer power of a top predator combined with the potency of a physical strength and an ease with extreme carnage of a kill. In this light, it is interesting to reflect on the reason that Colossal chose the dire-wolf for its latest de-extinction foray. As Brigitte has said, Lamm talks of the dire wolf as the ultimate popular icon. I think it goes a little deeper.  

The dire-wolf is essentially a bigger, more terrible wolf than our own grey wolf (Canis lupus). First named Canis dirus by Dr Joseph Leidy in 1858, it became Aenocyon dirus at some point during the 20th century. In the early years of the century, a new genus named Aenocyon was proposed which has Greek roots in ainós meaning terrible and cyon meaning dog. When combined with the species label dirus, the dire wolf is both terrible and fearsome. No wonder dire wolves are ‘top-line talent’ Mr Lamm.

Is it not the case that to wish to create and master an animal that has associations to such power and strength, is in itself a power bid? The act of creating a life so awesomely terrible, and then to contain it behind a fence, just goes to show who is top dog here. Colossal have all the cards.  

It is surprising that within the maelstrom of dire wolf metaphor and magic, there seems to have been no, or very few, ‘Frankenwolves’, which one might have expected to emerge as they did in ‘Frankenfoods’ when GMOs were in the limelight a couple of decades ago.

Many a discussion of genetic tinkering draws analogies to Mary Shelley’s (1818) iconic Dr Frankenstein in this way. Frankenstein uses his own brilliant powers of reason to create a new human and we all know where that ends, but he entirely forgets about feeling and caring. There has been little such discussion of Colossal’s project. Yet it would be appropriate to examine the kinds of motives and morality that Shelley addresses.

Why make a dire wolf when all other living mammals on this planet are in various (too often dire) states of decline? The grey wolf is already persecuted throughout its range. It is poisoned, shot, trapped and harried wherever it lives and there is increasingly little space where it can hide from the dire predator that stalks it 24/7.  

So, how can a dire wolf live in today’s world? In addition to its vulnerability to human aggressions, its original prey species are all extinct. So what will it eat? Will it change the balance of the ecosystems it inhabits? And if there is no chance of ever allowing a dire wolf to be free because it cannot make a living nor live harmoniously with other life forms, why create them in the first place? Are these gorgeous looking pups just sentient exhibits? Or are they set to end their lives as tawdry hunting trophies? Or perhaps they could be pet dogs?  None of this works for a large wild wolf. Yet the characters at the centre of the debate, the wolves, have been othered and dismissed as irrelevant.

Yet, these reflections shout out Shelley’s moral: an excess of reason is dangerous. If you only use reason, then you lack the warning signs of emotion. Unless we allow feeling to enter the debate, we will continue to be hypnotised by the magic of the genes and maybe even the promise of ‘de-extinction’. But I do not mean we should wail and scream at one another about the pros and cons of the Colossal project. No. It is perfectly possible to understand sentience and ethics and to discuss them without enacting the emotions that underlie some of these concepts. We need scientists and engineers who can be trusted to ask these questions themselves so that they can resist the urge to grab the power or the pop culture.

Featured image: Socks, modelled by Brigitte, one with extinct creatures and another with a wolf howling at the moon.

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