Scientists Claim to Have Brought Back the Dire Wolf

In a secret location in the United States, two white wolves are lounging in the grass in a sunny, roughly one-acre enclosure. It’s early spring and a chill wind blows through bare trees nearby. The humans in the enclosure are wearing their winter jackets. With their thick, shaggy fur, the 5-month-old wolves are better adapted to the cold.

One of the humans is Ben Lamm, founder and CEO of Dallas-based startup Colossal Biosciences. He has invited WIRED to be among the first to see the wolves. The animals, he says, are dire wolves, which went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. A large canine species that once roamed the Americas, dire wolves coexisted with other Ice Age megafauna such as saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly mammoths. The company claims it’s the first time an animal has ever been de-extincted.

The wolves, still pups, saunter around the enclosure, unaware that they’re in the wrong time period. The Game of Thrones series popularized the dire wolf as the emblem of the noble and doomed House Stark, and now Colossal claims to have brought it—or at least something that looks like a dire wolf—back to life.

Lamm points out the characteristics that make these animals dire wolves: more pronounced shoulders, a slightly wider head, and thicker haunches than modern-day gray wolves. They’re supposed to have larger jaws, too, but we don’t get close enough to find out. At 5 months, they’re already 80 pounds and are expected to get bigger than gray wolves. And of course, they’re white. Cue Jon Snow.

Lamm, a serial entrepreneur, cofounded Colossal in 2021 to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and other extinct animals. Sort of. Colossal isn’t directly cloning preserved DNA from prehistoric animals, à la Jurassic Park. Instead, it’s editing the genes of present-day relatives so that they look and act like their extinct predecessors.