return2ozmaDire wolf revived through biotech company's de-extinction process
justhachWild the amount of money spent bring back an extict species instead of trying to protect the ones we already have.
Its like trying to justify ruining the environment and driving species to extinction as no biggie because we can just have a do-over through the power of science.
RhaedasThat's exactly how it's being presented. I'm not necessarily against the research, but there are only a few species we'll be able to do this with. This isn't a back door to undoing damage done. Plus, why do we do it with things that will have to live in captivity, as a wild release would reek havoc on an existing biome. Actually, this is probably true of anything, even seemingly docile ones.
frezikThe biological research will certainly be interesting. I wonder about the social aspects of these animals. Dogs are intensely social creatures. Are these direwolves going to behave like the originals? Without being raised by the originals, almost certainly not.
jordanlundThey are doing that too… FTA:
“Colossal also said it had cloned four red wolves, a critically endangered animal with under two dozen thought to be left in the wild.”
That’s really interesting. Would be useful for research of life in early human or pre-human times.
“We’ve taken a gray wolf genome, a gray wolf cell. which is already genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves because they’re very closely related,” Shapiro said. “And we’ve edited those cells at multiple places in its DNA sequence to contain the dire wolf version of the DNA.”
My understanding is that that they identified genes associated with 20 key characteristics of direwolves, and edited those genes in the grey wolf genome. I guarantee that there are likely thousands of direwolf genes that they overlooked, so technically they didn’t create a direwolf. They created a grey wolf that looks like a direwolf.
henfredemarsVery interesting, but I would hesitate to call it true de-extinction because there’s no way to know what we don’t know. We don’t know what was in the parts of the DNA we don’t have.
There are lots of people complaining about the ethics… But, but, baby woof!
I just want to try dodo meat
Probably tastes like chicken…
Here’s a better article that isn’t as uncritically sensationalist.
arstechnica.com/…/de-extinction-company-announces…
tl;dr is that it’s basically just a gray wolf with 14 edited genes, most of which are from natural gray wolf populations rather than dire wolf genomes. The result is a gray wolf that’s visually similar to a dire wolf, not a dire wolf.
Visually similar to a GoT dire wolf. IIRC, actual Aenocyon Dirus probably didn’t have a white coat.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 It’s a wolf. But dire.
I honestly thought dire wolves were just a made up fantasy species, like owlbears and eagles.
The kind you’re picturing, and the kind they made, are.