Biotech company says it has bred three pups with dire wolf traits

A biotech company says it has bred three animals with key physical features of the dire wolf — a species that has been extinct for more than 12,000 years. The three pups were named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.

Colossal Biosciences says it used novel gene-editing technology to alter gray wolf DNA that led to the birth of the pups.

Some in the scientific community object to the Dallas-based firm's claim to have returned the dire wolf — or Aenocyon dirus — from extinction with its process of using genetically modified gray wolf embryos.

"It is all very misleading," Vincent Lynch, a professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo, told NPR in an emailed statement. "It is not a dire wolf; it is a gray wolf clone with some mutations that make it superficially resemble a dire wolf."

"Dire wolves were a distinct species, genetically distant from gray wolves. You can't 'bring back' a species just by making another animal look vaguely similar," Maarten Larmuseau, a professor of genetic genealogy at KU Leuven in Belgium, said in an emailed statement. "It's an interesting biotech exercise, but behavior, ecology, and learned social traits matter just as much as DNA, and those can't simply be engineered."