In an age when conservationists are concerned that the disappearance of thousands of wildlife species is imminent due to human irresponsibility, the recent claim by a US biotechnology company of resurrecting the long-extinct dire wolf through genetic engineering has created excitement as well as shock. The species was native to the Americas but went extinct some 10,000-12,000 years ago, probably because their megaherbivore prey also disappeared around this time. Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, said it is “a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts” and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.Dire wolves lived in a variety of habitats including plains and mountainous areas of North America and arid areas of South America. Fossils have been found in the asphalt pits at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles and in paleontological sites in the midwestern US, according to the Illinois State Museum. Colossal said two of the dire wolves were born late last year, while the third arrived in early 2025. All three live in a secure 2,000-acre nature preserve at an undisclosed location. “This massive milestone is the first of many coming examples demonstrating that our end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s cofounder and CEO, in a news release. “Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies.”But many scientists are crying foul. What Colossal has done, they point out, is edited some of the genes of the not-very-closely related grey wolf to make it resemble their distant cousin. “Colossal has introduced a small number of changes to the genetic material of a grey wolf to produce grey wolf pups with dire wolf features such as pale coats and a potentially larger size,” says Philip Seddon, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Nic Rawlence of the same university’s Palaeogenetics Laboratory wonders how the pups will learn how to be dire wolves. “Currently, they’re wolves running around in a paddock. And does the ecosystem it once lived in still exist?”But Colossal firmly rejects the many criticisms that have been made. Chief science officer Beth Shapiro says it doesn’t matter that the two species are not closely related. “When Colossal successfully edited 20 carefully chosen genetic variants into grey wolf DNA – 15 of them extinct variants that haven’t existed for over 12,000 years – we were attempting to resurrect key features tied to the functional essence of an extinct species,” she adds. Those features, it says, include being 20-25% larger than a grey wolf and having more muscle mass and an Arctic white coat.On the issue of how these animals will learn to be dire wolves, Shapiro says Colossal has created management strategies modelled on red wolf and Mexican grey wolf reintroduction programmes. “Those strategies include a stepwise approach to reducing human intervention, mimicking wild diet types and increasing the difficulty in which food items are presented to encourage the expression of wild behaviours,” she says. Colossal has become well-known for its pioneering approach to gene-editing extant, living species to make them more closely resemble related extinct ones – it is also attempting this with both the thylacine and the woolly mammoth, but what it has called the Colossal dire wolf is its first actual success with the technology.A number of experts say that bringing back extinct animals will not solve any conservation problems and that efforts would be better spent trying to find ways to save current critically endangered or vulnerable species. Worldwide, more than 41,000 species are currently threatened with extinction and more than 16,300 are considered endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.