🐺 Your next dog can be a Dire Wolf?!

The dire wolf has been resurrected and the game (of thrones?) is about to change.

In a scientific breakthrough that could forever change how humans interact with our planet, Colossal Biosciences said it has brought back an extinct animal that last walked the Earth roughly 10,000 years ago: the dire wolf.

The U.S.-based biotechnology company is also known for its ambitious goal of bringing back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.

Colossal also said it had cloned four red wolves, a critically endangered animal with under two dozen thought to be left in the wild.

"We're not a foundation, we're not a nonprofit, we are not an academic think tank. We are trying to actually develop products and build technologies," says Ben Lamm, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Colossal says its investors include Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Paris Hilton and Peter Jackson.

In March, the company revealed the "woolly mouse," a new type of mouse with a thicker coat of fur modeled after the woolly mammoth.

"I had all the confidence that this was going to work," says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist.

Shapiro’s team had to extract more dire wolf DNA from two existing fossils to better sequence the animal's genome. From there, Colossal elected to use a close relative of the dire wolf as the base.

"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."

Not everyone is convinced. Dr. Julie Meachen has made studying wolves her life’s work, and was a co-author, along with Shapiro, on a 2021 paper that concluded dire wolves and gray wolves diverged millions of years ago.

Meachen is impressed with Colossal’s announcement but remains skeptical.

"I don't think they are actually dire wolves. I don't think what we have is dire wolves," Meachen told the news. "What we had is something new -- we have a mostly gray wolf that looks like a dire wolf."

Shapiro disagrees with that thinking.

"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.

Shapiro’s team used surrogate dogs -- which have since been adopted through the humane society -- to help give birth to the dire wolves and Colossal says no animals were harmed in the process.

All three dire wolves live in a secure 2,000-acre nature preserve at an undisclosed location.

The older pair are named Romulus and Remus after the mythological founders of Rome, who are traditionally depicted as being suckled by a she-wolf. The youngest one is named Khaleesi after a character from the fantasy show "Game of Thrones," in which dire wolves play a major role.

"So when I saw them born and they were white, I was like, we've done it," Shapiro said. "Those are dire wolves."

The wolf field is a small one, and Meachen and Shapiro are working together on an upcoming research paper about dire wolves, but Meachen is not paid by or advising Colossal.

She wonders if Colossal’s efforts would be better spent on keeping the animals left on Earth alive.

"Is this for purely entertainment purposes?" Meachen asked. "The mission of helping to preserve the species that are alive and save them from the brink of extinction is an incredibly admirable mission. That is a mission that I could get behind 100%."

Colossal hopes its red wolf program is just the beginning of a broader effort to do just that.

"This sort of technology, as it becomes more widely available, is going to have tremendous benefits across biodiversity conservation," Shapiro said.

The State of North Dakota has also invested in Colossal, with an eye on helping the state save its dwindling bison population.

Lamm -- Colossal’s CEO and co-founder -- also hopes that its technology could one day help human healthcare in a meaningful way.

With the race on to produce scientific breakthroughs, Dr. Robert Klitzman, a bioethicist and geneticist at Columbia University, cautioned that it is important to carefully consider the impact of tinkering with ecosystems.

"So one wants to be careful if you're mucking around with genes, that there may be things we don't understand," Klitzman said. "You may produce a wolf that's twice as ferocious. You may produce a super wolf, or a super rat, or super mouse if you're playing with mice or rats, for instance, that eats everything in sight."

Despite this concern, Klitzman still believes Colossal’s technology could offer benefits if used properly.

"If there's an animal that we humans killed off and there are no more such animals and they have a place to live where they can go back into their wild environment and thrive," he said.

Colossal continues full steam ahead to its goal of reviving the woolly mammoth in 3 years, with chief scientist Shapiro saying it is just as risky to not use their technological breakthroughs.

"If we decide as a society that these new technologies that are at our fingertips are too risky, that we don't want to take the chance, that we're not going to try to save species by implementing genetic engineering types of technologies -- that is a choice that also carries consequences," she said.

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