chapotraphouse

Theyre not direwolves though. They contain what the researchers think is direwolf genes sampled from bones, but they just spliced these genes into grey wolf DNA and stuffed it into some surrogate dogs. It's effectively a new species, but it's no different to selective breeding but more expensive.

Not to mention these animals can't exist in the wild. They'd effectively be inbred to fuck immediately and wolves are already struggling to survive due to human predation (especially of prey species) and habitat loss. A bigger, slower, more inbred wolf is going to immediately eat shit.

This is a Theranos meme stock waiting to explode. The premise is nothing but a ponzi scheme designed to fund some unethical animal testing for some shitty zoo exhibits. The scientists behind this would rightfully be fed to their own subjects in a rational world.

@UlyssesT

They made the dogs from gambo real xD

I'm waiting for the inevitable news report when one of the rich billionaire asshole gets one of these boutique GMO-DNA direwolf as a pet and gets mauled

One less rich asshole in the world, courtesy of based doggo

Hell yeah. All you naysayers go on and keep saying nay, but 20 years from now, on those orange sky days where the wildfire smoke makes the heat bearable, and you leave your climate bunker to scavenge for scrap, the dire wolves stalking you are really going to add to the ambiance.

Dire wolves aren't wolves. They diverged from the common ancestor of actual wolves around the same time as the common ancestor of the tiger and the lion diverged from the common ancestor of the cat and the cheetah.

And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.

I hate really hate the media.

The founders of Colossal aren't interested all in the natural world. They're interested in bringing back what they surely think of as a badass animal for their own tech bro cred and even more importantly for money. If they succeed in creating gigantic wolves - those creatures aren't going to be reintroduced into the natural world. They're going to be bought by the super-rich and then stuck in cages to be shown off to the much poorer masses.

Look what we have. And you can never have.

A silver lining will be at least one super-rich person (hopefully a billionaire) won't be able to resist trying to pet one of his creatures and he'll get his throat ripped out.

deëxtinction

The New Yorker is going to keep using and keep creating umlaut words that nobody else uses until its last day in business. They must think of themselves as oh so sophisticated. But what comes to mind for me is heavy metal umlauts - Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and Hüsker Dü.

I hope one day we can do genuine de-extinction but it's about a thousand steps down the line of the ecological restoration we have to do

Why? Fuck let's stop the extinctions that are happening now! Fuck I hate this goddamn species.

Kinda funny in a "wtf" way that the USA is doing jurassic park shit before universal healthcare

There was a movie where they did this and it turned out to be a really good idea

Being chased by a horse sized wolf inside a themepark.

call me when they escape to wreak havoc and punish man's hubris

Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.

Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome.

Hay guys we messed with like a minuscule fraction of the genome of a living relative of an extinct creature whose full genome we definitely understand and now we have a new species!

God I hate de-extinction. I hate the science, I hate the term, I hate the credulous reporting. NO REALLY 14 SNPs FROM A SINGLE SAMPLE IS ALL IT'S GONNA TAKE TO BRING BACK AN EXTINCT SPECIES, BELIEVE ME AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR VC FUNDING.

The first step is de-extinction

The second step is maintaining it that way

V. Cute

what a fucking waste

We need something to keep the mammoths and future megatheriums in check.

stop

"Shits really bad yo." ~ Dire Wolf