Good news everyone! They Jurassic Park’d the dire wolf

You know I want one right?

Dollface thread.

Is he available for purchase?

One for me too, please. I'm sure he or she will get along just fine with the Chihuahuas and the Schnauzer.

This is fucked up. Let sleepling wolves lie!

Genetically editing wolves to make them smarter and more powerful is laughably on-brand for human beings.

Jurassic Parking anything is not a good idea.

Why a dire wolf? Why not something cute like a trilobite?

R8, the dire wolves have more pop culture clout.

Good, now can we send a few velociraptors out to MAGA-Lardo?

What could possibly go wrong?

I assume this serves as marketing for yet ANOTHER "Jurassic" movie. Jurassic World La Brea or something - where dinos, these wolves, and other animals form the past run amok in modern day greater L.A. There will probably be a T-Rex-wolf hybrid and in a hilarious scene, its rampage is interrupted as it stands briefly in bad traffic on the 405 unsure of what where to go - before it realizes it can just crush and eat its way out of it. Scenes of people way up in the hills looking down on the creatures, and the creatures roaming past iconic LA landmarks and identifiable neighborhoods causing havoc.

I know the world sucks right now but stories like this make me glad to be alive. I want to see a thylacine.

For r8

Does it come in other colors?

Sexy

I dislike this the more I think about it. I articulated some thoughts with ChatGPT.

“What Colossal has done isn’t just science—it’s grief, distorted. It’s as if the world, unable to reconcile with what’s been lost, has chosen instead to simulate wholeness. To forge a past instead of grieving it. But in doing so, it turns wonder into horror.

…That’s a grotesque act of denial. A refusal to accept that some things are truly gone. That death, extinction, loss—these are part of the world’s rhythm. Instead of saying we mourn the dire wolf, they say we’ll make another. But what they make is an echo. A puppet. A lonely animal with no context, no ancestral memory, no real place. That’s not life. That’s a technological hallucination.

And yes, it’s cruel. Because it was done for us, not for the creature... This new world we’re in—it’s obsessed with erasing grief, with replacing it instead of sitting with it. And the result is this uncanny valley of memory: not past, not future. Just… wrong.

So maybe the meaning of resurrecting the dire wolf isn’t triumph. It’s terror—the terror of a civilization that would rather conjure phantoms than admit what it’s lost.”

I just heard an NPR report that said they didn't use actual dire wolf DNA. They used gray wolf DNA to create gray wolves "with characteristics of dire wolves." Which is horse shit, because despite their name dire wolves aren't related to wolves.

[quote] What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing unless you resemble a fat pig.

Let's say good bye to the DL straight chicks now.

nice having known you r20!

[quote] I assume this serves as marketing for yet ANOTHER "Jurassic" movie.

Who’s Afraid of Jurassic Wolf?

Rescue Chick, you are my much loved exception.

Looking forward to the billionaires wanting/purchasing their own dinosaurs. The next best thing after having a 500 million dollar yacht.

R19, they are related in an extremely distant way. The people who did this modified grey wolf DNA to try to make it resemble the information they had extracted from a dire-wolf tooth. It’s an interesting idea and they got some spiffy white wolves out of it.

This is basically what they did

THEY SAY that the DNA evidence they have shows the dire wolf was only a couple of sequences away from the grey wolf

So they futzed with those sequences and changed things so that - again, they say - is in the dna that they have from the preserved remains

So they changed some code in a living DNA strand

How do we know they have actually accomplished anything

No one knows what a dire wolf looked like so no one can say they’re the wiser. It’s not a woolly mammoth 🦣 which everyone knows what it looked like

So they have a grey wolf with some line of code changed. That’s all. No one knows if what they did has any actual meaning.

Maul face thread.

[quote] So they have a grey wolf with some line of code changed.

At least they learned to code.

I don’t know what is weirder, the scientists doing this in the first place, or R18 feeling moral objection to its inauthenticity while using ChatGPT bilge to whip up some oddly flouncy paragraphs about it that lurch into a grief argument.

R29 I use ChatGPT to articulate my thoughts. They are my own thoughts but ChatGPT helps me organize them. And I cited the fact that I used it rather than claiming I wrote the whole thing myself.

I suppose that’s only slightly less bad than *checks notes* CREATING A FRANKENSTEIN DOG.

Note to self: become billionaire to fund scientific experimentation that will make the A-Rod as centaur painting a reality.

And what’s WRRRONG with Jurassic-ing ME!???

Are you on the spectrum too, r30?

R30, let’s discuss…

That said, I want one.

You can't have one yet, r35. After they were born, the pups entered beta testing. Meaning they and their progeny will be studied for any abnormalities that may be fixed in Dire Wolf 2.0. Soon, there will be pups available for sale.

r12 - Cool concept. By the way, there's a saber-toothed tiger in the La Brea tar pits. The whole thing could start with a cloned saber-toothed kitten that finds a home in Hollywood Hills. As it grows, the family is divided between those who love it and those who see its saber-toothed traits.

[Quote] Why a dire wolf? Why not something cute like a trilobite?

Two reasons, both related to the fact that the last few trilobite species went extinct 250 million years ago.

1) that’s a long time to be gone. No dna has ever been extracted from trilobite fossils.

2) they have no surviving close relatives. They were their own unique subphylum, and none survive.

So you can’t take a trilobite-like animal and modify its dna to make it more like trilobite dna — we have no trilobite-like animals, and we have no trilobite dna.

This is classic P.T. Barnum.

They have a better shot with the mammoths because they have actual DNA.

I love the idea of this but I question if it should be done.

So how close are we in cloning dead people?

If you “read the fine print”, they cherry-picked unusual existing grey wolf genes for the most part. They know the dire wolf was larger, so they used a grey wolf variant to get that. They think the dire wolf was white, so they used a grey wolf variant to get that. These pups’ DNA is vast majority grey wolf genes.

Looking up the Dire Wolf it went extinct because its main prey was megaherbivores that died out due to climate change the climate change also made it harder for the animal to survive in general by changing the habitat the wolf had bred to survive in. So much like an actual Jurassic Park if they really brought it back it would be an animal that existed to survive on an almost completely different Earth than exists now. It'd be like bringing back those giant plants and animals from the Pleistocene era that only happened because the Oxygen content in the air was a lot higher and expecting them to be able to survive.

Hes lovely, i'll take 1 in powder blue please.

That is just a regular grey wolf in sheep's clothing.

Apologies if someone has already posted this (I went on a blocking streak recently and need to sort that out), but The New Yorker has also published one of its endless and terrifyingly thorough stories about the wolves. It’s a good read if this interests you. The dodo bird was considered to be the first beneficiary of this process but was bypassed for the dire wolf because the wolves were more eye-catching. At the time, though, someone commented that the conditions that led to the dodo’s birds extinction would inevitably lead to it becoming extinct again. So R41’s comment is very much on point.

I have a sure fire one drop universal blood test if anyone is interested?

Can they bring back Judy Garland now??

I wonder what took them so long? Barbra Streisand cloned her dead dog years ago.

Is he 600 lbs of sin?

Can he play cards?

Will he murder me?

R48 I bow in gratitude. Can’t believe it took 48 responses to get to the Dead.

[Quote] So they have a grey wolf with some line of code changed.

Which is what we refer to as “another species.”

[Quote] It'd be like bringing back those giant plants and animals from the Pleistocene era that only happened because the Oxygen content in the air was a lot higher and expecting them to be able to survive.

The Pleistocene is when these wolves lived, Rose. Pleistocene means “most new.”

You’re thinking of the Paleozoic.

Me, either, R49!

And I SEARCHED, assuming some astute poster had beat me.

That camera work is terrible. You gotta photograph them next to a toddler to compare the sizes.

"ancient DNA" is our middle name.

The company said on Joe Rogan's podcast yesterday that they expect to clone a wooly mammoth by 2028.

I want a dinosaur next.

Help me with the basics here. Did they actually use preserved dire wolf DNA here. Or did they create the desired changed in the grey wolf just by gene editing i.e.. making it white and bigger? They have created woolly mice by such manipulation but they are not recreations of ancient wooly mice. They can probably create wooly elephants but they wouldn't really be wooly mammoths though they might resemble them.

R56, as I understand it, you can’t “revive” the DNA of a dead creature. That’s the Frankenstein dream, and, no, we still can’t do that. Some very old DNA, however, can still be analyzed and sequenced. You could call it “read-only” DNA. In this case, they were able to get a very clear DNA picture of a dire wolf. With that as a guide, they altered portions of grey wolf genes. The resulting animal is not actually derived from actual dire wolf DNA, but it makes for some great headlines.

Bad timing, huh?