Here's a better article that isn't as uncritically sensationalist.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/de-extinction-company-announces-that-the-dire-wolf-is-back/

tl;dr is that it's basically just a gray wolf with 14 edited genes, most of which are from natural gray wolf populations rather than dire wolf genomes. The result is a gray wolf that's visually similar to a dire wolf, not a dire wolf.

Wild the amount of money spent bring back an extict species instead of trying to protect the ones we already have.

Its like trying to justify ruining the environment and driving species to extinction as no biggie because we can just have a do-over through the power of science.

"We've taken a gray wolf genome, a gray wolf cell. which is already genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves because they're very closely related," Shapiro said. "And we've edited those cells at multiple places in its DNA sequence to contain the dire wolf version of the DNA."

My understanding is that that they identified genes associated with 20 key characteristics of direwolves, and edited those genes in the grey wolf genome. I guarantee that there are likely thousands of direwolf genes that they overlooked, so technically they didn't create a direwolf. They created a grey wolf that looks like a direwolf.

Great ... a wolf that's twice the size of a normal one .... while we're at, let's put a machine gun on it ... or maybe a lazer.

Make them hyper intelligent and give them thumbs.

There are lots of people complaining about the ethics... But, but, baby woof!

It sounds like they did some gene editing to select characteristics the dire wolf supposedly had, as opposed to finding an ancient DNA sample somewhere and working from that. So it's more of a genetic simulation than the real deal right?

Like just because you know of some gene that happens to give people pronounced brow ridges doesn't mean you can bring back the Neanderthal. Or am I not understanding this correctly?

I honestly thought dire wolves were just a made up fantasy species, like owlbears and eagles.

That is a lot of effort put into making a slightly different wolf.

Very interesting, but I would hesitate to call it true de-extinction because there’s no way to know what we don’t know. We don’t know what was in the parts of the DNA we don’t have.

Damn it No I've had enough winter already

I just want to try dodo meat

DINOSAUR

I saw a report that said they'd have Wooly Mammoths by 2028. I'd go to the zoo to see a Wooly Mammoth.

“I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it's filling the role of that species then you've done it," she said.

How does she know what a dire wolf looked like and acted like though? They went extinct 10,000 years ago! I hate this quite frankly . Unethical, wasteful, and they’re not even dire wolves!

That's really interesting. Would be useful for research of life in early human or pre-human times.

I can't wait to be disemboweled by a velociraptor. What a time to be alive!