It’s not quite Jurassic Park, but Dallas based Colossal Biosciences, has taken DNA from fossils to bring back what the company calls a dire wolf, an animal that’s been extinct for 12,500-13,000 thousand years.
“Taking a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 73,000-year-old skull and making puppies is like a little bit of magic,” CEO of Colossal Biosciences, Ben Lamm, said in the Dallas Morning News.
The claim by Colossal Biosciences has some in the scientific community debating whether or not the pups are actual dire wolves.
Ancient Genomics Laboratory group leader, Pontus Skoglund asserted that the new pups were hardly related to the dire wolf in an online Bluesky post utilized by Dallas Morning News.
“If you lined up a dire wolf genome with a gray wolf genome there would be millions of differences,” Skoglund said. “These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.”
The debate over the de-extinction of the dire wolf has reached all levels of scientific inquiry including classes on campus.
Biology and Anatomy and Physiology teacher Andrea Alejo first heard about the de-extinction off of Tiktok.
“At first I was surprised,” Alejo said. “I didn’t know that it was something they were trying to work on, but I thought it was really interesting.”
Biology and AP Research teacher, Dr. Chris Ham described that this development can be perceived both scientifically and morally.
“I was curious about the scientific side of it and about how the technology was able to get there. Ecologically, if we bring them back, will it actually help?” Ham said. “The bigger question is about morals. Why should we? just because we can? Mother nature has answered and this thing is not supposed to exist, and now we’re trying to bring it back. Are we trying to play God?”
For Alejo, the question of whether animals such as the dire wolf should be revived depends on the intentions behind the recreation.
“It depends on the purpose,” Alejo said. “I think in one way it would be beneficial to bring them back to help sustainability, but if it was more of a trial to see if it’s possible, then not really. “
However, Alejo also emphasized the increase in diversity the dire wolf’s return could bring.
“Diversity is very very important. It’s how organisms and species stay alive. If you don’t have any diversity, there’s no ecosystem, essentially to break it down,” Alejo said. “As a whole, to ask if we could be doing all of this, it can be a very good thing.”
People and companies playing God concern Ham, but there could be a silver lining as far as science is concerned.
“From an ecological perspective, diversity is the biggest metric ecosystem stability. The more diversity, the more stable the ecosystem,” Ham said. “Diversity in the context of balancing the ecosystem is usually a good thing.”
