In April 2025, a company in Dallas announced the birth of three pups. They were grey wolves, genetically edited, and the company called them dire wolves. The names were Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. The species they were named after has been extinct for roughly ten thousand years.
The company is Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by Ben Lamm, a software entrepreneur, and George Church, a Harvard geneticist who has spent four decades working on reading and writing DNA. It is valued in the billions and has announced projects on the woolly mammoth, the thylacine and the dodo. On paper, the ambition is to reverse extinction.
It is worth being precise about what actually happened in April. The pups are not dire wolves. They are grey wolves whose genomes were edited at a modest number of sites to resemble what we know of dire wolf DNA, reconstructed from fossils. They look the part. Their behaviour is that of the animal they actually are.
Scientists have a word for this: a proxy. Not the vanished species, but something shaped to fill the ecological or imaginative space it left. The distinction matters, and it is the honest part of the story rather than a caveat to it.
The reason proxies are the realistic target is that extinction does not leave a clean copy behind. What survives is fragments. For the mammoth, the best material comes from carcasses frozen in Siberian permafrost, and even those give damaged, patchy genomes, riddled with gaps and contamination from bacteria and from the scientists who handled them. You cannot rebuild a book from a few hundred surviving sentences. You can write a new book in a similar voice.
Consider the passenger pigeon, which went from an estimated three to five billion birds in North America to zero in about fifty years. The last one, named Martha, died alone in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Her body was packed in ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where it still is. We have her skin and her bones. We do not have her genome in any complete form, and we certainly do not have the vast flock behaviour that made the species what it was. A flock of billions is not a property of a bird. It is a property of a population, and the population is gone.
This is the pattern. What extinction destroys first is not the animal but the context: the migration routes, the predators, the grasses, the diseases, the sheer numbers. A revived individual dropped into a world that no longer contains any of that is not a restored species. It is a specimen, alive, in a place that no longer knows what to do with it.
None of this makes the work worthless. A cold-adapted elephant grazing the tundra could, in theory, help keep permafrost from thawing, and the underlying technologies — cheaper genome synthesis, better editing, tools for reconstructing ancient DNA — are genuinely useful regardless of whether any animal results. The thylacine project, in particular, has pushed real advances in marsupial genetics that have nothing to do with resurrection.
But the honest frame is not resurrection. It is the construction of something new that stands in for what was lost. And that is a much older human activity than genetic engineering. We have always built replacements for the gone: the aurochs replaced by the cattle bred to resemble it, the vanished forests replanted with something a bit like the original, the dead language taught from a reconstructed textbook.
The hard question is not whether we can. It is whether a stand-in does what we actually want. If what we wanted was the animal, no. If what we wanted was to stop treating loss as final, then perhaps the thing that matters is not the creature but the refusal to accept that nothing can be done.
Extinction means a line ends. What Colossal is doing does not reopen the line. It starts a new one nearby, and names it after the one that closed. Whether that is science, sentiment, or both is still genuinely undecided.
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