Dire Wolf Resurrected: Navigating the Taxonomic Uncanny Valley

On evolving frameworks, ecological nostalgia, and the mythos of de-extinction

I was still recovering from the overwhelmingly cute woolly mouse debacle when Colossal Biosciences released a new creature from their factory of wonder.

Colossal announced “the return of the dire wolf”. They claim to have birthed three dire wolves that have been engineered based on a genome sequenced from fossils of a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone.

These creatures: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi (c.c John Snow) exist at the delicate intersection between ancient DNA and cutting-edge genetic engineering. They are said to embody the promise of "de-extinction," an emerging scientific frontier tangled in ethical, ecological, and philosophical controversy.

Embryo stage on the left to 1 month old dire wolf pups on the right. source: Colossal Bioscience

But what exactly have they birthed, and what does it mean for existing scientific frameworks and our relationship with nature?

The Genomic Ship of Theseus and Taxonomic Thresholds

When Colossal announced they had "resurrected" the dire wolf by editing 20 genomic sites in modern grey wolves, they thrust us into a classic Theseus philosophical paradox. If you replace planks in a ship one by one, at what point does it become a different vessel? Similarly to the case of these dire wolves, with 99.5% genome similarity with the grey wolf, are these animals truly dire wolves, still grey wolves, or something entirely novel?

The scientific community has been quick to weigh in on Colossal’s claims to have achieved the world's first "de-extincted" species and the tension it evokes:

• Evolutionary geneticist and Colossal advisor Love Dalén notes that: “There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% grey wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question,”

• Paleontologist Julie Meachen, who along with Colossal CSO Beth Shapiro, co-authored the paper that found dire wolves and grey wolves diverged millions of years ago, was more blunt: "I don't think they are actually dire wolves— What we have is something new — a mostly grey wolf that looks like a dire wolf."

• Colossal’s own CSO, Beth Shapiro offered a more flexible definition: "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."

• Paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill was more skeptical: “This is a designer dog. This is a genetically modified grey wolf.” She adds: “I have more than 14 Neanderthal genes in me, and we wouldn’t call me a Neanderthal—There is cool science here, I just wish it wasn’t getting lost in hype.”

Together, these perspectives surface a deeper ambiguity. At the heart of the debate is a persistent tension between genetic composition and identity: how much of what something is lies in its code, and how much in its form, phenotype, function, or history?

Colossal's scientists contend that they have targeted genes with outsized phenotypic impact. Specifically those controlling size, skull shape, coat color, and muscular build, creating animals that physically resemble their extinct counterparts.

George Church has also made the point that "a single genetic change can cause speciation", and he's not wrong. In evolutionary biology, speciation isn't always the result of slow, cumulative change across millions of base pairs. Sometimes, it hinges on a single pivotal mutation.

Church provided the example in Drosophila, where the transposition of the JYAlpha gene disrupted sperm production and fertility across lineages, creating a clear reproductive barrier. Similarly, in land snails, it was discovered that reversing a single gene controlling shell coiling led to mating incompatibility, instantly splitting the population into reproductively isolated groups.

These studies give some biological weight to Church's claim that Colossal's 20 simultaneous targeted edits could generate something genuinely species-distinct from the grey wolf. Unlike natural mutations, which often take eons to accumulate and get selected for, Colossal's edits are deliberate, multiplexed, and coordinated.

The reality is, there aren’t fixed thresholds for when genetic difference becomes taxonomic distinction. The boundary isn't genomic, but rather composite, made of ecological preferences, behavioural isolation, physiological performance, and cultural interpretation. It's not a line, but a zone.

This makes Colossal's dire wolf a kind of threshold creature: it doesn't merely look like a dire wolf, it possesses multiple phenotypic signals of speciation, yet it lacks the evolutionary descent we traditionally associate with taxonomic identity. It isn’t an organism shaped by reproductive isolation in deep time, but a designed biological artifact intended to resemble what that process once yielded.

In that sense, it occupies a sort of "taxonomic uncanny valley". It is recognizable as wolf-adjacent, with just enough divergence to unsettle our categorical reflexes. With our existing framework, these new creatures are no longer grey wolf, and also not traditionally dire wolf. They dwell in a liminal space of biological authorship as creatures of intent rather than inheritance.

When Technology Outpaces Our Frameworks

​The dire wolf project is shining a light on a broader pattern in contemporary sciences where our technological capabilities are outpacing our conceptual infrastructure.

This phenomenon is not new, it has been explored and anticipated by several thinkers over the past decades. In 1958, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam reflected on discussions with John von Neumann and recalled: “one conversation centred on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

In other words, there was a growing recognition that rapid technological change could lead to a "singularity" beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue. They were already grappling with the idea that technology might eventually transform or destabilize the very frameworks through which we understand ourselves, our societies, and even life itself.

Then in 1965, statistician I.J. Good introduced the concept of an "intelligence explosion", positing that the creation of ultraintelligent machines could initiate a cycle of self-improvement, leading to rapid technological changes beyond human comprehension. ​

Today we have techno-philosophers like Benjamin Bratton that might describe a situation like this as a "pre-paradigmatic moment," where our technological advancements have surpassed our theoretical frameworks. This inherently necessitates the development of new paradigms to comprehend and manage the rapid progress.

In the instance of de-extinction, its important to reflect on our inherited taxonomic systems that are rooted in the Linnaean tradition and refined through Darwinian evolution. These theoretical frameworks have long viewed species delineation as a natural, historical process.

*CRISPR enters the chat*

We have unprecedented gene-editing capabilities today that challenge previous delineation, ultimately rendering the already blurry species boundaries even more grey and technologically permeable. Rather than straining to force these novel entities into pre-existing conceptual containers, this moment reveals a need for our own conceptual evolution.

The engineered dire wolf invites the kind of boundary-blurring, “category-transgressive” thinking Donna Haraway championed in A Cyborg Manifesto. The push for conceptual models that don’t collapse under ambiguity, but thrive in it, recognizing that in a world of hybrids and biotechnological assemblages, the boundaries we once relied on are no longer fixed, but fluid.

This is an opportunity for us to rethink how we make sense of organisms that emerge from deliberate technological interventions. It’s a chance for us to dare to recognize them as more than just modified versions of existing species, but as entities representing a novel synthesis of biology and technology.

The Anthropocene Paradox: Where Scientific Play Meets Conservation

We find ourselves in the Anthropocene, an era defined by the global impact of human activity on Earth’s systems.

It's a time of stunning contradiction: we're driving unprecedented extinction rates while simultaneously developing the technological prowess to potentially reverse them. There is an unmistakable irony here.

Rather than addressing root causes like habitat destruction or carbon emissions, there is a risk that we instead become fixated on technological interventions that merely treat symptoms or worse, enable the destruction further. Bringing back a dire wolf doesn't directly solve the conditions driving today's extinctions.

However, as counterintuitive as it may seem, science rarely follows a straightforward path. Many groundbreaking discoveries stem from research driven by curiosity or just sheer serendipity rather than planned outcomes.

Darwin himself was a curious “gentleman companion” and amateur naturalist when he informally took part in a surveying expedition. His curiosity led observations laid the groundwork for his theory of natural selection, which was published over two decades later in the famous On the Origin of Species (1859).

De-extinction efforts embody this spirit of scientific curiosity leading to innovation. In their quest to de-extinct Ice Age wolves, Colossal scientists created a “game changing” cloning technique enabling reproduction from blood samples. This reduces the need for tissue biopsies and minimizes harm to donor animals. They also established a new bar for precision germline editing, which has a vast landscape of possibilities across medicine, conservation, and agriculture.

This “spectacle” of de-extinction can also inject imagination into fields that sometimes grow methodologically conservative and creatively stale.

These engineered dire wolves reflect human longing as much as scientific achievement. A sort of ecological nostalgia for a wilder world. Through them, we grasp at "ancestral echoes," attempting to reconnect with primordial wildness.

We can recognize both the potential and limitations here. De-extinction science and technology isn’t just about bringing species back, it’s already reshaping how we protect the ones we still have. Technologies like cryopreservation, cloning, and genome editing are being transferred from the lab to the field, helping save critically endangered animals today. Black-footed ferrets have been cloned from cells frozen decades ago, and northern white rhinos are the focus of groundbreaking embryo implantation efforts

However, we must slightly temper techno-optimism and ensure that CRISPR's brilliance doesn’t distract from the fundamental work of reducing emissions, preventing habitat destruction, and preserving existing biodiversity. The most effective de-extinction strategy after all is actually just preventing extinctions in the first place.

Ultimately, I think that whether these animals represent "authentic" dire wolves matters less than the conversations they've sparked about stewardship, scientific boundaries, and our ecological aspirations. They don't restore the past but suggest that biotech can now remix extinction into something living and symbolically powerful, a biological simulacrum blurring the line between resurrection and reinvention.