A Dallas Company Says It Can Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life. Not Everyone Is Buying It.
Three pups born in a Dallas lab look like creatures that roamed the Earth more than 10,000 years ago. Their creator, a biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences, says they are “de-extinct” dire wolves. But a growing number of scientists say that claim stretches the truth — and the argument cuts to the core of what it means to bring a species back from the dead.
The Company Behind the Claim
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2 billion after raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton, announced in 2024 that it had produced the three dire wolf pups. The dire wolf is a species believed to have disappeared more than 10,000 years ago.
The announcement sent ripples through both the public and scientific communities. The dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger — Colossal says it is working to revive all of them.
How the Science Works
According to an article posted by The Guardian on March 15, Colossal’s research takes place at a 55,000-square-foot facility in northwest Dallas. Scientists there extract ancient DNA from fossils and use CRISPR gene-editing technology to modify the genomes of closely related living species.
CRISPR allows scientists to make precise changes to the DNA of living organisms. For the dire wolf project, scientists edited 14 out of roughly 19,000 genes in gray wolf DNA to produce hybrid offspring with traits associated with dire wolves — lighter fur color, larger size and greater cold resistance.
The resulting animals are not clones of ancient dire wolves. They are Gray wolves whose genetic code has been altered to express certain physical characteristics linked to their long-lost relatives. That distinction sits at the heart of the scientific debate surrounding the company’s work.
The ‘Jurassic Park’ Question
It is a comparison the company has heard many times before. Colossal’s chief executive Ben Lamm acknowledged the parallels between the company’s work and the film during his interview with The Guardian.
“I don’t mind the Jurassic Park comparison because we get it a lot,” he said. “Jurassic Park taught a large population of people, including non-scientists, that there’s this thing called DNA and humans now can change it.”
“Now, the movie goes terribly wrong because it’s a dystopian movie about hubris. But at the end of the day, I think it did a lot more right than did wrong,” Lamm added.
He said the rapid loss of biodiversity has created what he described as a “moral obligation” to explore technological responses to extinction. “Parents in middle America care about conservation and also get excited about science,” he told the outlet.
What’s Next on the List
The company says it plans to attempt the revival of the dodo, a flightless bird driven to extinction by human activity roughly 400 years ago. Scientists at Colossal have cultivated primordial germ cells — early precursors to sperm and egg cells — from the pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative. Researchers are also working with emu eggs in efforts related to reviving the moa, another extinct flightless bird once native to New Zealand.
The woolly mammoth is another target. Colossal has said it hopes revived species such as the woolly mammoth, created using gene-edited Asian elephant DNA, could eventually be released into the wild to restore ecological roles such as seed dispersal, predation and carbon storage.
The company is also working to revive the Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
Each project would follow a similar approach: identify the closest living relative of an extinct animal, extract and study ancient DNA from fossils, then use gene-editing tools to modify the living species’ genome so that the resulting offspring exhibit traits of the extinct creature.
Scientists Push Back
Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University at Buffalo, criticized the characterization of the dire wolf project.
“They made genetically modified gray wolves, not dire wolves – to say they are dire wolves is entirely arrogant,” Lynch said. “You can’t put a mutation into a related species and call that thing the extinct thing. You can’t bring things back in the way Colossal are doing it.”
Lynch also challenged the company’s definition of species identity, telling The Guardian: “They say if it looks like the thing then it’s the thing, but we haven’t used that definition for a long time.”
The critique targets a fundamental question: When only 14 out of roughly 19,000 genes have been changed, is the result a dire wolf — or simply a gray wolf that looks a little different? For scientists like Lynch, modifying a handful of genes in a closely related living species falls far short of genuine de-extinction.
Colossal’s Response
Chief scientist Beth Shapiro said debate over definitions misses the broader conservation potential of the technology.
“I was surprised by some of the pushback, but if you don’t want to call them a dire wolf, that’s fine, I don’t care,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro framed the work as a necessary step in the fight against biodiversity loss. She argued that conservation science may require more aggressive solutions as biodiversity declines.
“If you’re not controversial, you’re not pushing hard enough, right?” she said. “If we just stick with what everybody is comfortable with, then we’re just going to keep it with the status quo and we know that the status quo is not good enough.”
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
