Dire Wolves Are Nothing New

I first started seriously looking into dire wolves sometime last year, when the researchers on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show claimed to have found the skull of a recently deceased dire wolf in a creek on the ranch, and a guy in a park ranger-style outfit from a local museum sorta-kinda claimed it was authentic. Now, I view Skinwalker Ranch as pure entertainment, but out of curiosity, I looked up dire wolves to see how likely this would be. My main question was why only a single skull was ever found, when, according to Wikipedia,

It can be assumed that dire wolves lived in packs of relatives that were led by an alpha pair.

So if there are living dire wolves roaming the Utah mountains, they would be found in packs, their remains would be more common, and the packs woould be both visible and audible. So I dismissed the idea of a live dire wolf as having the same credibility as the rest of Skinwalker Ranch; it's fun entertainment. But before I dropped my research, I discovered that there have been numerous efforts to breed dogs to resemble dire wolves:

Healthy, long-lived giant companion dogs with a wild look delivered right to your front door!

We are the only certified American Dirus dog breeder in the world!

Working in strict accordance with DireWolf Dogs, Int'l standards and Dire Wolf Project morals and ethics, we adhere to all guidance from the founder of the breed, Lois Schwarz.

Any dire wolf that isn't bred by us is a fake, immoral and unethical! Accept no substitutes!

So what are we to make of the news that dire wolves, real ones, not artfully bred dogs, are back from extinction? Frankly, I think this is about as credible as the park ranger wannabe at Skinwalker Ranch announcing that the skull the boys found in the creek is a real dire wolf. Apparently the public consciousness harbors a dire wolf fascination that nobody was aware of.

My first question is why the revived dire wolves are white, when the public imagination, as shown in the web image of the "dire wolf" dog breed at the top of this post, is a more wolflike gray. According to Time,

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.

What part of the "deft genetic engineering" and rewriting "the genetic code of the common gray wolf" turned the new dire wolves white?

For instance, on the left is an artist's concept of a dire wolf from several years ago. Why does it look so different from Romulus and Remus in color, fur length, and bulkiness? I can't avoid thinking that the deft genetic engineers who came up with Romulus and Remus were working from a mental image just as much as the artist who came up with the dire wolf in the drawing -- they just had different ideas of a dire wolf, and as far as I can see, neither is more accurate than the other.

Johanna Berkman asks at The Free Press,

And yet the central question could not be hashtagged away: Are his [Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences] three newly minted pups actual dire wolves? Or just a lookalike simulacrum?

Absolutely the former, insists the somewhat frenetic Lamm: “There’s never been an animal with this number of edits. There’s never been an animal with ancient DNA in it. The fact that we took a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth and engineered puppies?”

But when I pressed him to answer his own question, he said, “Matt, do you want to go?” and turned to the also bearded Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, who was with the dire wolves when they were born.

“It’s a dire wolf,” said James. “It is a dire wolf. It looks like a dire wolf. It has dire wolf DNA. There’s nobody in the world that has studied dire wolf genetics more than the people that you’re on this call with. And we have more data than anybody’s ever published on the dire wolf. And what we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes and the associated genotypes of the dire wolf and then used that to edit a dire wolf. So, this animal looks and acts, and is a dire wolf. And it fills the same ecological niche.”

Wait a moment. There's never been an animal with this number of edits. An edit, I can attest as an editor, is a tweak on something. A human being is starting with a gene from a modern wolf and tweaking it. I've heard it explained that this is no different in principle from what ordinary breeders do -- they look for a trait and breed animals to emphasize it; it's just done in the lab.

Matt James says, "what we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes" -- I remember from high school biology that a phenotype is simply what the animal looks like. But we've never seen what an actual ancient dire wolf looks like, have we? Up to Romulus and Remus, the best guess of the paleontologists was something more like the short-haired brown image just above. What made Matt James, editor in chief of Romulus and Remus, make swuch a different call?

For that matter, the dog breeders at the Dire Wolf Project are in effect editors as well, just using old-fashioned breeding to modify DNA instead of doing it in the lab. But their idea of a dire wolf seems different from either of the other images we have.

I'm actually with the people at the Dire Wolf Project: accept no substitutes.