It’s still a dog. It just has better PR. The real dire wolf, by the way, was never just a big gray wolf. A 2021 genetic study confirmed that dire wolves weren’t even close relatives.

In order to conduct this so-called de-extinction event, scientists at Colossal extracted DNA from a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone, and sequenced the genome.

Lamm said his dire wolves started howling at 3 weeks old, responding to human singing and the sounds of owls. The first two, Romulus and Remus, are now around 6 months old.

"Colossal has said that the gray wolf and dire wolf genomes are 99.5% identical, but that is still 12,235,000 individual differences," Nic Lawrence, a paleogeneticist and associate professor at ...

For over 200,000 years, dire wolves roamed across North America—from southern Alberta, Canada to Florida, and even down into Chile. The ancient animals were megafauna hunters, ultimately ...

Dire wolves, with reddish fur, facing off against gray wolves. This image, made by artist Mauricio Anton in 2020, was done in consultation with researchers, who think it’s likely the animals had ...

The paper details how the researchers spent more than a year to "decode the dire wolf’s evolutionary history," Colossal said in a statement. "We generated high-quality ancient genomes from dire ...

The dire wolf genome likely differs from that of the gray wolf in millions or tens of millions of ways. Editing 14 genes is interesting, but it’s not a reconstruction or de-extinction.

In its announcement of the dire wolves’ birth, other fascinating news did not get the same headline attention: Colossal had cloned two litters of red wolves. Red wolves are the most critically ...

In 4th Edition D&D, dire wolves got a bunch of bony spikes in the art. Also, they became even deadlier at biting targets they knocked down. They went from making trip attacks as part of their regular ...

Colossal Biosciences, an American biotechnology company, announced the "de-extinction" of the dire wolf, a prehistoric wolf species that died out more than 10,000 years ago, in April 2025. Three ...

Whether it’s his two NFL teams during his playing career, the New England Patriots or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or his numerous ventures off the field (we’ll ignore FTX for now), it seems like every ...