In April 2025, a biotech company announced that an Ice Age predator was back. Three white wolves had names: Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.
The obvious question came next: what actually was a dire wolf?
The real dire wolf wasn't just a big grey wolf.
Dire wolves were large predators across the Americas during the last Ice Age. They looked so much like grey wolves that it was easy to assume the two were close relatives.
Ancient DNA said otherwise. A 2021 study in Nature sequenced five dire-wolf genomes from remains between 13,000 and more than 50,000 years old. It found that dire wolves belonged to a lineage that split from all living canids about 5.7 million years ago, with no evidence of gene flow between dire wolves and grey wolves or coyotes.
The new animals started as grey wolves.
Colossal Biosciences sequenced dire-wolf DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone. It then took cells from grey wolves and made 20 edits across 14 genes. In the company's words, no ancient DNA was spliced in: scientists rewrote the grey wolf's own genes to match.
Those edited cells were cloned, and domestic dogs carried the pups. According to Colossal, 15 of the edits match sequences found in dire wolves. Others, including the changes behind the white coat, used grey-wolf variants chosen to recreate dire-wolf traits.
Colossal made 20 edits. Nature's news team reports that the two species' genomes differ at about 12 million DNA letters.
That is not a measure of how much "dire wolf" the animals are, and many of those differences may have little visible effect. It shows how selective the edits were.
So is it a dire wolf?
Colossal calls the project de-extinction, or functional de-extinction: recreating an extinct animal's key traits rather than an exact copy. It chose the name because the animals look like dire wolves and carry key traits it identified. Its chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, has acknowledged that an identical resurrection isn't possible, telling New Scientist that the animals are "grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned".
The IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group goes further. It concluded that the three animals "are not dire wolves", nor proxies for dire wolves under the IUCN's guiding principles.
Nobody cloned a dire wolf. Colossal made gene-edited grey wolves carrying selected dire-wolf traits. The animals are real; whether the dire wolf is back depends on what you mean by "back".
Sources checked 1 October 2026·5 sources ↓