<p>A gray wolf photographed in northern California in January 2025. Photo by Malia Brytus/California Wolf Project.</p>
A Dallas-based genetic startup announced earlier this month that it had resurrected the dire wolf, a long-extinct species of canine that shares a common ancestor with modern-day gray wolves. Billing it as the world’s first animal de-extinction, the news made headlines across the globe as a revolutionary breakthrough for animal conservation efforts.
But in a new TIME magazine op-ed, Professor Justin Brashares and Associate Adjunct Professor Douglas McCauley write that the gene editing technique used by Colossal Biosciences, the company behind the de-extinction effort, means the creatures are not actually dire wolves. Colossal reported modifying 14 genes from a gray wolf to produce characteristics—a white coat color and long, thick fur—that they identified by extracting and sequencing ancient dire wolf DNA.
“These dire wolves and other creatures that may be 'de-extincted' don’t necessarily behave, eat, or sound like the species they allegedly replicate,” Brashares and McCauley wrote. “As such, they cannot fill back in the gaps of this beautiful tower of life.”
To Brashares and McCauley, “so-called de-extinction efforts” pull the spotlight away from what they consider to be one of the gravest crises on the planet: the accelerating decline and extinction of nature. Both are working on efforts—Brashares as co-leader of the California Wolf Project, and McCauley as faculty director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment—that leverage technology to support biodiversity conservation and environmental stewardship.
“Normalizing transgenic approaches and capitalizing on ‘de-extincted’ animals under the guise of nature conservation is dangerous, but it doesn’t mean there is no role for the use of advanced technology in fighting extinction,” they write. “Quite the opposite. We must throw everything we have at the extinction crisis including the most cutting-edge technologies at our disposal. But as a community, we must use these tools intelligently, transparently, and ethically.”
Read the full op-ed in TIME.