Dire Wolves or Liar Wolves? Metaphors in the Colossal Bioscience ‘De-Extinction’ Discourse
Dire wolves or liar wolves? --Well, this is mean. The pups themselves are good doggos, I’m sure. I mean, it’s not them that’s claiming to be dire wolves.
Wolf Photo by Reyk Odinson on Unsplash (Edited slightly by me)
This post was initially inspired by the University of Nottingham’s excellent Making Science Public blog. Often, the blog posts examine the language and metaphors used in science communication. For example, there are posts on topics such as AI, the Covid-19 pandemic, and climate change. Similarly, I wanted to have a look at the language and metaphors used in the recent mainstream media reporting, the rebuttals from the science community, and wider online discourse around the supposed ‘de-extinction’ of dire wolves by the biotech startup company, Colossal Bioscience. * As I was writing this blog post (I’m very slow, don’t judge), Making Science Public posted about this story: The (not) de-extinct dire wolf: Metaphors, myths and magic *
Full disclosure, I am not an evolutionary biologist or geneticist and therefore I do not have the expertise in the genetic science involved to assess the validity of the claims myself. (I do, however, have some experience and expertise in media and metaphors.) So, like the general public reading about these fantastic(al?) claims, I have to rely on media reporting and science communicators to help understand the initial claims and then the counterclaims. Indeed, at times, this post is just me thinking through the metaphors and analogies that are used and trying to comprehend what the hell is going on.
The Reporting and Coverage
Dire wolves were a species of large canine native to the Americas during the Pleistocene era. The large carnivores were “an imposing hunter up to six feet long, with skull and jaw adaptations to take down enormous, struggling megafauna”, such as horses, bison, an extinct genus of camel, and other large herbivores. The dire wolf went extinct approximately 13,000 years ago.
However, earlier this month (7th April), Colossal Bioscience claimed that they had successfully genetically engineered three dire wolves. In October 2024, two ‘dire wolf’ pups were born. They were named Romulus and Remus, after the legendary twin founders of Rome who were famously raised by a female wolf. In January 2025, a third was born - a female who was named Khalessi, after a character in G.R.R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. -- Incidentally, it kinda bugs me that the character Khaleesi has no real connection to dire wolves in the series. Surely, a woman from House Stark, whose sigil is a dire wolf, would make more sense. Arya or Sansa, perhaps? Or Catelyn a.k.a. ‘Cat’? That would have been funny!
In Colossal’s eyes at least, these pups are dire wolves and, therefore, the company claim to have achieved the “de-extinction” of “a once-eradicated species”. They claim that “after a 10,000+ year absence, [they are] proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” It is telling that before going through the rather more conventional scientific process of journal publications and academic peer review, this scientific achievement was announced through mainstream media outlets such TIME and Rolling Stone and social media content designed to go viral. The company posted on their social media profiles (e.g. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) a video of the cute puppies howling, claiming it is the first dire wolf howl in over 10,000 years:
Colossal Bioscience’s post on Twitter/X, on April 7th 2005: “SOUND ON. You’re hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years…”
Scientific achievements are often explained in terms of bits of popular culture (e.g. film, TV, sci-fi, etc). They connect to things already in the public consciousness and to things that can more easily capture the imagination. It appears dire wolves were specifically chosen because of their representation in pop culture. In a New Yorker piece, Colossal CEO Ben Lamm makes clear “a really important” reason for working on the ‘de-extinction’ of dire wolves: They “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.”” It appears they were chosen for the vibes!
Game of Thrones was clearly the biggest pop culture influence. In fact, G.R.R. Martin is an investor in Colossal Bioscience and is listed as a co-author on the pre-print academic article Colossal scientists have written on their achievement. Game of Thrones is arguably responsible for bringing dire wolves back into the collective consciousness. It’s how people understand what animals have supposedly been resurrected - how they are supposed to look, and perhaps how they are supposed to behave. The Colossal news stories were often accompanied by artwork and stills from the Game of Thrones TV show.
It is curious that rather than, say, a ‘biogenetic engineering company’ or a ‘conservation company’ (as this seems to be a big part of their PR media blitz), Colossal describe themselves as a ‘de-extinction company’. ‘De-extinction’ obviously throws up another pop culture comparison - the Jurassic Park series of films. This would likely be the public’s only knowledge of the idea of de-extinction. Jurassic Park is a film ultimately about the lack of control over nature and about human hubris. There are surely also resonances with the modern ‘move fast and break things’ tech startup culture. Now, I’m not saying that the ‘dire wolves’ will escape and eat a load of people, but there are similar vibes, no? Indeed, many of the comparisons in the media reporting were sarcastic or ironic. The Jurassic World Twitter/X account made light of the news, quipping “We see no possible way this could go wrong”.
Much like the dinosaurs in JP, the Colossal ‘dire wolf’ pups are living their lives in a secret and protected location. Colossal chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, notes:
Maybe it’s just me but parts of this sound like it could easily be dialogue lifted from one of the Jurassic Park films! Incidentally, this surely makes Colossal’s claim they are ‘returning the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem’ nonsensical, right? They’re not in the ecosystem at all, it’s not their natural environment, they’re not hunting or killing prey. (Although, I guess they could mean eventually they [or their offspring? Can they have children?] will be returned? But I think that’s unlikely). Not that I’m advocating for their release into the wild necessarily, but it really raises the question, what do the scientists think they’re studying? And why?
Well, that is the big question, isn’t it?
Some have pointed out the apparent slipperiness in terminology used by Colossal to describe what the pups are. In the initial media coverage, they were heralded as dire wolves. As New Yorker article points out, “the word “de-extinction” appears nearly five hundred times on the company’s website; ordinary people could be excused for thinking that the word referred to creating an exact genetic replica of a once alive animal.” However, as Beth Shapiro notes, what Colossal are doing are “creating these functional copies of something that used to be alive”.
It feels a bit like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too, by having the accolade of ‘resurrecting dire wolves’ but also recognising that that’s not really what they are.
Shapiro acknowledges, “the pushback that we’re going to get from everybody is that it is not a hundred per cent of the way to the dire wolf. But we want to say with confidence that we’ve done this functional deëxtinction, and I think we have.” Much seems to turn on the definition of de-extinction. Colossal do seem to make the point that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) define de-extinction as “the generation of proxies of extinct species that are functionally equivalent to the original extinct species but are not “faithful replicas.” (On their X account, Colossal make this point through a meme). However, on their website, Colossal claim they want to redefine it as functional de-extinction:
Screenshot from Colossal’s website: https://colossal.com/de-extinction/ (28/04/2025)
In the case of these ‘dire wolves’, I guess the question is why? Why create them? For animals made extinct because of recent human activity, then, sure, engineering functional copies for adaptability to allow them to thrive in today’s environment makes sense. But why do we need functional copies of dire wolves? And by functional copies, I take it they mean something that performs the same or similar processes in the ecosystem as the original species. Their ecosystem doesn’t exist anymore. The ecosystem has evolved into what we have now. And so, we wouldn’t need functional copies of dire wolves because grey wolves, or any other related canid for that matter, already exist and already perform similar functions in an ecosystem, right? So what functions are they supposed to perform that are not already being performed?
And this is beside the point anyway, as “the animals are going to remain in captivity”. They would only ever be performing functions in an artificial monitored ecosystem.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that this endeavour, while an impressive scientific feat, was done to see if they could, for the vibes, and to promote themselves, boost funding, and raise stock price. And, I guess, fund their other projects that are more relevant to the idea of functional de-extinction? But then does that justify the creation of these animals? — As an aside, what kind of ethical clearance do biogenetic engineering companies have to go through?
Screenshot from MIT Technology Review article: Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/08/1114371/game-of-clones-colossals-new-wolves-are-cute-but-are-they-dire/ (Captured: 28/04/2025)
Another metaphor used in the coverage was that of a recipe. In the original coverage, The New York Times article described a Recipe for a Dire Wolf. MIT Technology Review also had a De-Extinction Recipe (see image above). The steps in the recipe described in the latter article are:
Step one: Choose an exciting extinct species, like dire wolves.
Step two: Extract DNA from dire wolf bones. Create a gene map.
Step three: Use CRISPR to add some dire wolf DNA to cells of a grey wolf.
Step four: Inject the edited cell into a dog egg. This is cloning.
Step five: Transfer the cloned embryos into uterus of a domestic dog.
The metaphor of a recipe is often used in genetics, as is the similar metaphor of a blueprint (which also appears in the ‘dire wolf’ coverage, e.g. here and here), Both, however, have been critiqued for being overly reductive and deterministic. See Condit et al.’s (2002) paper ‘Recipes or Blueprints For Our Genes? How Contexts Selectively Activate the Multiple Meanings of Metaphors’ for a discussion on the relative merits of the two metaphors for genetics.
The Rebuttals and Critique
As expected, there was pushback on Colossal’s claims.
The initial media coverage was criticised as “client journalism” and “a carefully orchestrated PR campaign”.
One of the first critiques I read was a Substack post by science communicator and Lecturer in Genetics at UCL, Adam Rutherford. To explain the number of changes Colossal made to the genetic code and therefore why their wolves are not dire wolves, he uses the analogy of a book. He writes:
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.
I think another useful metaphor used to explain the scientific processes involved appeared in a widely shared Bluesky thread in which Jess McLaughlin, an evolutionary biologist and Assistant Professor at University of Alaska Anchorage, livetweeted (liveskeeted?) their reactions while reading the dire wolf preprint journal article by the Colossal genetic scientists. To help explain the problem of sequencing DNA, especially that of extinct animals, McLaughlin uses the analogy of a puzzle:
Puzzle. Image by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash
Picking up and extending the metaphor a little to see if I understand it, I think gene sequencing is like you finding a big Ziplock bag of puzzle pieces in the attic and wanting to complete the puzzle. Let’s say it’s a puzzle of a church (I dunno, maybe ‘church’ is scrawled on the bag in sharpie), but when you try to do it, you find you actually have to do ten puzzles. And each completed individual puzzle would show slightly different sections of the same church, so, for example, one would show the path through some grass and the bottom of the church door; another would show the entire stained glass window; one would show the tip of the steeple and a lot of sky; another would show the top of the door and the bottom of the stained glass window; another would show the top of the stained glass window and the bottom of the steeple, and so on. There are overlaps in what part of the church each puzzle shows. It happens, however, that it is a really old puzzle and over time lots of the pieces have disintegrated or gone missing, so even with the overlaps there are significant gaps. You don’t have any of the puzzle boxes for reference. However, downstairs in a cupboard you do have a newer puzzle of another church. And it has fewer missing puzzle pieces, and, importantly, you have the puzzle box. This second church is a different architectural style, but you think it is similar enough to your original church to help you complete the original puzzle(s), so you use it as a reference. (Edit: on a side note, I have no idea why I made it a church?? Something to do with my Catholic school education or do I just think all puzzles should be of churches?? Surely, a picture of a wolf, or any animal for that matter, would have made more sense!) So, I’m guessing this is similar to what the scientists did in the film Jurassic Park, right? Where the dinosaur DNA was old and broken so they filled in the gaps in the DNA with more complete DNA from other animals, e.g. frogs.
As I understand it, in the case of the Colossal ‘dire wolves’, the original dire wolf DNA was too big a mess of puzzle pieces and had too many missing pieces to reconstruct the animal’s complete genome so Colossal used, what they argue is, taxonomically similar DNA, that of grey wolves, and then they performed a small number of edits on that grey wolf DNA. Were the edits based on the incomplete pieces of the genes that they were able to sequence from the two real dire wolf specimens? - Oh, actually, I think only 1 of the 14 edits was from an actual dire wolf specimen. The result is then grey wolves with a few assumed dire wolf traits, such as fur colour, size, and skull shape. (And I guess the size and shape of the real dire wolf skulls and bones that have been preserved and recovered would also have been a helpful reference?). And I say ‘assumed traits’ because we don’t actually know exactly what dire wolves looked like because, of course, the original puzzle is incomplete? I’m guessing all this would be like doing the more complete puzzle of the second church but adding into it a few of the original pieces - or rather probably more like homemade photocopied pieces – and then saying you completed the first church puzzle found in the attic.
I think there also seems to be an issue with the underlying assumptions of Colossal’s reference genome – i.e. the puzzle you thought was similar enough to your original church to help you complete the original puzzle. Other evolutionary biologists have argued that dire wolves are not even really wolves, which would suggest that using the grey wolf as a reference genome to create ‘dire wolves’ was a mistake.
For a long time, it seems like it was theorised that there was close kinship between dire wolves and the smaller grey wolves alive today due to the resemblances in the recovered dire wolf skeletons. Here we can bring up another metaphor frequently used in evolutionary biology: the family tree. In this case, cousins. It was thought that dire wolves “were just bigger cousins of grey wolves”. The use of the cousin metaphor is designed to show the relative closeness in evolutionary biology.
However, a 2021 study (which has Colossal’s Beth Shapiro as one of the co-authors) suggested that any resemblances are actually the result of convergent evolution, that is, “when species separately evolve similar adaptations because they lead a similar lifestyle”. This 2021 study suggested that “although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago”. The study found that “there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes”, which suggests “that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species.” So, using the family tree metaphor, dire wolves and grey wolves are not cousins but even more distant relatives.
However, it looks like Colossal’s findings seemingly flip these 2021 findings back again, as they claim “the dire wolf was the result of hybridization between two ancient, now extinct canid lineages […] and the new findings suggest they share 99.5 percent of their DNA with grey wolves.” Their findings have not been peer-reviewed yet, and I’m just going off of the reaction of the broader evolutionary science community which seems sceptical about their findings. Although, reading this WIRED article, it says “Shapiro says that she and the authors of the original paper are planning to release a new paper that incorporates the new data from the Colossal analysis.” So, maybe there’s something to it after all?
Source: ‘Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, New Genetic Clues Reveal’ in Scientific American. “A pack of dire wolves (Canis dirus) are feeding on their bison kill while a pair of grey wolves (Canis lupus) approach in the hopes of scavenging.” Art by Mauricio Anton.
‘It’s only a dire wolf if it comes from the Americas region of the Pleistocene epoch. Otherwise, it's just sparkling grey wolf.’ – Someone somewhere on the Internet, probably.
OK, so according to large parts of the scientific community, these Colossal pups are not dire wolves. - Dire wolves? More like Liar wolves! Am I right, folks? Ahem…
As Rich Grenyer, Associate Professor of Biogeography at University of Oxford, puts it: “it’s not species being revived, it’s a few of their characteristics being borrowed by a species from today.” - Or, you might say, it’s teaching a new dog some old traits? I’m sorry, I’ll see myself out…
Grenyer continues by making the humorous comparison: “It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short French man to wear his hat.” McLaughlin notes that this is a particularly apt metaphor “because Napoleon was not actually all that short, but Colossal is similarly selling a version of what they envision dire wolves as instead of what they actually were.”
Similarly, Ran Blekhman (Associate Professor at University of Chicago in the Section of Genetic Medicine within the Division of Biological Sciences) claims: “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.”
A final line of critique emphasises that animals are more than their bodies. They exist in environments; they exist within contexts. As one expert on parasites wrote on Bluesky:
In a similar move that looks outwards rather than in, Adam Rutherford notes:
All this resonates with a line in posthumanist philosophy I keep thinking about here. It’s a line about ‘nothing coming without its world’, and it emphasises how entangled any single piece is in the environment, how we are all interdependent, and so should think with an ethics of care. In a time when we should be careful with our actions, it certainly seems as if Colossal have been too careless with theirs.
I guess I cannot NOT end with a quote from Jurassic Park quote: “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”