Easter is coming and speaking of resurrections, dire wolves, made famous by HBO’s Game of Thrones, have been extinct for around 12,500 years, but “thanks to genetic engineers at biotech company Colossal Biosciences, these majestic predators are back,” Live Science reported. The pups were even named after the dire wolves from the HBO series: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

“The company claims to have achieved this by extracting DNA from dire wolf fossils in 2021, isolating and growing gray wolf cells, and “tinkering” with the genes. They then transferred that DNA into empty canine eggs and transplanted those into fertile dogs,” Daily Dot explained.

As for this being a resurrection event, “Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Science.org reported. “Many researchers were also quick to note that according to a 2021 genetic analysis published in Nature, the dire wolf might not even be a wolf at all, belonging instead to a North American lineage of dogs that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. As that study’s lead author Angela Perri told Science in 2021, the dire wolf was more closely related to the African jackal than the gray wolf and may have resembled “a giant, reddish coyote.”

“(Colossal Biosciences) Chief Science Officer Dr. Beth Shapiro told New Scientist the distinction between regular wolves and dire wolves comes down to the definition of ‘species,’” but parsing words in an attempt to justify Colossal’s version of the science, comes down to the fact that at this point, the company’s de-extinction technology is a science project, albeit a sophisticated one. It does make for great click bait, or as Daily Dot put it, “‘The wolves are normal, the state of journalism is dire.’”

To have authentically de-extincted a dire wolf, Colossal would have needed to clone one exclusively from the original animal’s DNA, and not enough was available from the bones from which the source material was culled. Still, what is really known about the animals, once they’ve matured from being cute little cubs, and precisely what traits were grafted into these ‘de-extincted’ predators?

As heads up and note to self: “Decades ago, the drug baron (Pablo Escobar) smuggled hippos into South America for his private menagerie. They’ve been multiplying ever since. Now officials are taking extreme measures to counter the problem… In Africa (where the beasts have natural predators to help keep the population in check), hippos are thought to kill some 500 people a year, making them among the most dangerous animals to humans, according to the BBC and other sources…unsettling incidents are increasing,” said Smithsonian Magazine.

Escobar was shot dead in 1993. “In 1998, the government seized the property and moved the animals to the zoos, except for the hippos, which were thought too dangerous to move. So they were left there, and, oh boy, did things get worse. The hippo population kept growing, given that female hippos can procreate 25 times in their lifetime. As the population grew, the hippos began to migrate elsewhere, and now, the authorities have lost track of how many there are. These massive animals…have begun to dominate ponds, swamps, lakes, forests and even inhabited regions of Colombia, posing a great danger to people. Moreover, they produce an average of nine kilograms of faeces per day, which has begun to poison soil and water, damaging entire ecosystems,” Far Out Magazine reported (How Pablo Escobar’s hippos destroyed the Colombian countryside).

It’s always important to consider possible long-term consequences, which is not always an earmark of tech.

As for the dire wolves, cloning is nothing new, but what Colossal did is not that. Recreating an animal identical to the original started when Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland on July 5, 1996, and people have been cloning beloved pets ever since for a hefty a price, and that science is still not legal in the US.

In the case of the dire wolf, this is far from a de-extinction event, as Colossal has been claiming, breaking one of the most basic of startup rules: under-promise and over-deliver.

As Cultura Colectiva posited, “Is this the first step toward de-extinction? Or just a slick genetic cosplay?”

Colossal’s de-extinction event is more akin to creating lab-grown meat re Impossible Foods and calling it meat, albeit a plant-based version, although considering that animal cells are also used in the process, how can it then truly be called vegan any more than Romulus, Remus or Khaleesi can be called dire wolves? In our humble opinion, impossible, or as one of Dolly’s cloned progeny might put it, “Meh.” Onward and forward.