Extinct no more, the Time cover proclaimed.

Synthetic biology startup Colossal Biosciences literally brought back the dire wolf — a predator that’s been extinct for 10,000 years — by editing a gray wolf embryo to “match” its ancient cousin’s DNA, Time reporter Jeffrey Kluger wrote in the magazine’s Monday feature story.

Naturally, the internet had questions. Was it actually dire wolf tho? Community Notes contributors went to war over the issue, successfully attaching notes to — then having them removed from — the Time magazine tweet and others. Self-identified ‘experts’ chimed in. Ultimately, confusion and chaos prevailed. Even Joe Rogan couldn’t get a straight answer.

“Is this a 100% dire wolf or is this a new thing?” Rogan asked Colossal CEO and cofounder Ben Lamm in an episode that dropped the same day as the Time feature.

In Lamm’s view, if his dire wolves look and smell like dire wolves — if they have the lost traits that made the animal unique, ecologically, visually — “they’re just that animal,” he said. The Jurassic Park creatures were spliced together with frog DNA, but no one questions the fact that the movie’s about “dinosaurs,” he told Rogan.

In my view, Time’s Kluger used the word “match” a bit too generously. Colossal made 20 genetic edits to the pups, achieving characteristics like a bigger size and white fur, it said in a press release. To actually — like, literally — recreate a dire wolf, you’d need to make more changes than that. Maybe millions, one biotech founder told me.

Whatever. By midweek, the only appropriate answer to “But is it really a dire wolf?” was: “Who cares?” A more interesting debate had taken over: what exactly is the point of creating a dire wolf?

I looked into it.

DIRE WOLF TECH IS SAVING RHINOS

Colossal, which has raised $435 million to date from celebrity investors such as Chris Hemsworth, Tom Brady, George R.R. Martin, and Peter Jackson — and whose most recent $200 million Series C valued it at $10.2 billion — has developed a tech that can sequence genomes, compare them across individuals or species, and make corresponding edits with CRISPR and other tools. While most researchers tend to edit one gene at a time, Colossal makes hosts of edits within a single generation of animals. What it pulled off with the wolves represents a rare leap in the field.

Only a handful of animals with more than one or two gene edits even exist, Josie Zayner, cofounder of biotech startup The Los Angeles Project (and Lamm’s friend), told me. And most of those are “model organisms,” animals that scientists have been messing with for decades.

“Motherfuckers are just gene editing mice and shit, and who’s ever gene-edited a wolf before? Like nobody,” she said.

Besides, if there are approximately 1 gazillion genes between wolves and dire wolves, Colossal’s 20 edits to recapture Canis dirus (the extinct dire wolf species) are a step toward creating “100% dire wolves,” no?

Regardless, Colossal is using the same tech to help out endangered species around the planet — sharing it with researchers mostly free of charge.

It’s in the process, for example, of sequencing northern white rhino DNA. There are only two of them left, so Colossal is using specimens from museums to discover lost genetic diversity that could be edited back into today’s rhino embryos, making the species more resilient to disease and environmental changes.

Similarly, Colossal is working to save the American red wolf. There are only about 15 left in the wild, all in North Carolina. The company’s four clones, made with DNA from three genetic lines, are actually more diverse (thus resilient) than the remaining “real” ones.

On Rogan, Lamm said Doug Burgum, the interior secretary (who oversees US wildlife), wants to work with Colossal to “productionize” (make a lot of) and “biobank” the red wolf species (digitally catalogue its DNA).

Colossal’s even looking to make “super quolls.” This Australian carnivorous marsupial is endangered thanks largely to the cane toad, introduced by humans in 1935 to control a beetle population. The toads ate approximately zero beetles, poisoned native predators like the quoll with their deadly toxins, and spread uncontrollably across northern Australia.

Colossal studied what genes among the cane toad’s natural predators (back home in South America) made them resistant to its poison — and then engineered this change into the genomes of fat-tailed dunnarts, a mouse-like marsupial. Now it wants to edit quolls.

“So then you could make these super quolls that eat the cane toads,” Ben said.

“I hope you don’t have to bring in big toads to eat the quolls,” Rogan replied.

Retrofitting animals that currently exist to better survive our mistakes — whether it’s the introduction of destructive non-native species, overhunting, or deforestation — seems to resonate with people.

But what about already extinct animals like mammoths, dodos, and Tasmanian tigers? Lamm thinks that Colossal will create a thylacine, an extinct, wolf-like marsupial native to Australia, in the next eight years. Should it?

Thylacines went extinct because the Tasmanian government literally paid people to kill them off. A hundred years later, their DNA was just sitting in a museum basement. Lamm told Rogan that Colossal reconstructed 99.9% of the genome from altogether forgotten remains — including a full thylacine skull that was… just sitting in a random bucket.

I don’t know if this is really stupid. But I keep thinking about the bucket. We reduced this species and countless others to unceremonious basement storage (if they’re lucky). Do we have a responsibility to bring them back? What if we cared that much? Space travel sounded pretty stupid, too. Now we have GPS.

Still, what fate could they have besides living in a really expensive safari where the Colossal squad of celebrity bro investors (Tom Brady et al) get to bro out over how cool they are?

I’m not sure. Predators are generally good for environments; Tasmanian devils are transmitting a facial tumor disease that might not exist if thylacines were hunting off the weak and sickly ones.

But none of that is really up to Colossal anyway.

The startup is focused on the science; it’ll leave any actual rewilding efforts to experts, like conservation groups that know a lot more about ecology, and thylacines, than you or me.

DESIGNING ANIMALS

Every animal embryo starts as a single cell. That single cell turns into a giraffe because of the genetic code inside. Once you understand how to modify the genetic code to do things, you can hypothetically create whatever you want, Zayner said. Today, it’s woolly mice and dire wolves. Tomorrow, maybe it’s meat sacks without sentience that we can eat. Pigs with human blood. Actual trash pandas (raccoons that eat garbage). Literal unicorns (a real goal at Zayner’s startup).

“We can think of a biological future that’s more in harmony with the way we live, and that requires creating completely new things,” she said.

Colossal plans to spin out human-relevant technologies like artificial wombs (the company says it’s working on those to replace animal surrogates) and plastic-eating microbes. Breaking, a company it spun out last year, is using synthetic biology to make these naturally-occurring microbes eat plastic faster, condensing the process from years to hopefully weeks.

“Just like supercharging the quolls, right?” Lamm told Rogan.

Lamm was constantly accused of playing God this week. Rogan kept the trend going. What gives this tech founder the right to disrupt the environment’s natural order?

“I think that we’ve become the apex predator on this planet and we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean, we over hunt something,” Lamm replied, adding: “Every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we drink hydrogenated water, we are playing God on some level. Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.”

I don’t know about God, but Colossal is at least playing Noah. The startup is building a digital Noah’s Ark of species — a biovault for life containing genomes that might’ve been lost forever.

That’s something, right?

— Blake Dodge