First came the dire wolf – the wooly mammoth is next

With all the insane news this week surrounding President Trump’s tariff and trade drama, only one non-political story was significant enough to break through the news cycle: a Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves and is currently keeping them in a secret 2,000-acre natural habitat somewhere in the United States. That’s right: dire wolves. An extinct species. A beast so mythical that we only really know of it from Game of Thrones. In fact, as we learned in an interview with a comic book magazine, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has even visited the dire wolf reserve. There is a non-AI-generated photo of him online cradling a dire wolf pup and weeping tears of joy. 

Immediately, skepticism blew up online. These are not dire wolves, people said. They are just regular wolves that look a little bit dire-wolfy. To address that, I went to the source, speaking on a Zoom call with Ben Lamm, the 43-year-old billionaire founder of Colossal, and Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer. I asked Lamm straight-up: “Are these actual dire wolves?” He immediately got defensive, and then said, yes. 

“They look like dire wolves,” he said. “They have dire wolf DNA. They will fill the ecological niche of a dire wolf. So I don’t know what else would make them more dire wolf. I guess my question often for people is, if this isn’t a dire wolf, then what is a dire wolf? If somebody could better define dire wolf for me, I’d be all ears.” 

Though this may seem like mad-science magic, the rebirth of the dire wolf is actually an act of deep ecology and advanced conservation biology. The dire wolves exist in an undisclosed location, James told me. Now that they’re older and more wolf-like, they no longer have direct contact with humans, who feed them carcasses and then study them affectionately from a distance. But Colossal is not actually using the DNA research for additional dire-wolf creation. There’s nowhere to put dire wolves into the ecosystem other than in created parks. To do otherwise would be dangerous, both to the wolves and to other species. 

Instead, the goal is to use this dire-wolf genetic research to help repopulate and diversify the severely endangered red wolf, which is endemic to North America and which would disappear without human help. They’re using the genetic material of extinct species to prevent further species extinction. 

“What we’ve done,” James says, “is create modern red wolves that have high levels of ancestral red wolf representation, of what we call ghost alleles, which are sort of this lost genetic representation of what the red wolf was before the near-extinction. And we’re creating a vehicle in which that could be injected back into today’s recovery population as a way to genetically rescue the world’s most endangered wolf.” 

This is an astonishing scientific breakthrough. And even more astonishing is what Colossal intends to do next with this technology. They’re trying to revive the thylacine, a Southern Hemisphere carnivorous marsupial that humans eradicated in the 1930s, in order to save the northern quoll, a similar species endemic to Australia that’s nearing extinction because it can’t stop eating invasive poisonous cane toads. 

But that’s just the appetizer. They’re also trying to genetically rebirth the dodo, of all things, in order to try to save the pink pigeon of Mauritius. Most insanely, Colossal is trying to engineer the biological return of the wooly mammoth, which would be the coolest thing to ever happen and would also help save endangered Asian elephants. 

I can understand why people are skeptical. The media spent years telling us 23andme was the natural endgame of mapping the human genome, and look at them now. But Colossal is a real company, and unless they’re lying, Wired magazine is lying, and George R.R. Martin is lying, dire wolves once again walk the Earth. I wouldn’t bet against these people. 

Assuming I survive the global trade war, in my lifetime I’m not only going to see humans walking on the surface of Mars, I’m also going to see (at least in photos), live wooly mammoths on Planet Earth. That’s beyond extraordinary. It’s a miracle; however, Lamm says, dinosaurs are off the table. DNA can only live in fossils for about 1.2 million years, and despite what the people who run the Creation Museum in Kentucky might say, dinosaurs have been extinct a lot longer than that. 

Mammoths, though, are not only possible, but probable. They’re going to have to live somewhere. Maybe there’s a mammoth-sized reason we’re going so hard after Greenland.