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Colossal Biosciences, the genetic engineering company working to bring back the woolly mammoth, has actually already brought back one of its extinct Ice Age cohabitants: the dire wolf.
The Dallas, Texas-based biotech company revealed Monday the recent successful birth of three dire wolf puppies, a major step in proving the viability of Colossal’s “de-extinction technologies” and its potential use in bringing back other species.
The birth of the dire wolf pups marks the first successfully de-extincted animal, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a press 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,” Lamm said. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”
Lamm and George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, founded Colossal in 2021 with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth. Since then, the private company, valued at about $10 billion, according to Bloomberg, has expanded its plans to include the de-extinction of the Australian thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and the dodo.
Last month, Colossal revealed it had genetically engineered the Woolly Mouse, which shared some coat characteristics with a woolly mammoth, including longer, lighter-colored hair with a rough, woolly texture. “This is a very, very big step for us because it proves that all of the work we’ve been doing for the last three years on the woolly mammoth is exactly what we predicted,” Lamm said at the time.
With the reveal of the dire wolf puppies, Colossal shows “that our end-to-end (de-extinction) toolkit that we talked about with the mouse works, but now it’s working with ancient DNA and it’s been pretty incredible,” Lamm told USA TODAY.
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