I'm Calling Bullsh%$

Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering firm has claimed that they have recreated the dire wolf species, which has been extinct for more than 10,000 years.

They haven't.  This is marketing to Game of Thrones fanbois.

For over 2 million years, dire wolves roamed present-day North America until their extinction around 10,000 B.C.

On Monday, a Dallas-based bioscience firm said it had brought the species back to life in the form of three pups, claiming to have “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction” in a remarkable statement on its website.

Notice that there is no mention of any peer reviewed or pre-peer reviewed paper?

Red flag. 

The team at Colossal said the pups — named Khaleesi, [More GoT Wankery] Romulus and Remus, and ranging in age from 3 to 6 months old — were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago.

Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal’s technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves — and that the process raises ethical questions.

“The reality is we can’t de-extinct extinct creatures because we can’t use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

………

Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky about the dire wolf project that he was “not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.”

………

In the wolves’ case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. “There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,” he said. “Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we’ve got left,” he said. This could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases.

This sounds a lot like Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons levels of humbug.