The Return of Dire Wolves?

[Ninurta]

This past Monday, An outfit calling itself "Colossal Biosciences" made a bold claim that they had "de-extincted" the Dire Wolf.

It's bullshit, of course. A scam. A hoax. Never happened.

I was all set to go off on one of my mega-rants about it, but a little while ago, I found a short video that encapsulated most or all of my objections, and decided to post that in lieu of my usual wall of text:



So these creatures are NOT Dire Wolves. They are merely GMO Gray Wolves, designer wolves, Run of the mill Gray Wolves, just with a flashier paint job.

Granted, their ears are different - bigger, pointier, than Gray Wolves. They are bigger than the aerage Gray Wolf, and are projected to reach about 150 pounds or so. They're white, an off-color for wolves... but neither the size nor the color are out of range for run of the mill Gray Wolves.

If these are "Die Wolves", then I beat the company at "de-extincting" them by about 16 or 17 years, and using far more low-tech means - I just bred them.

Below is an image of my big male timber wolf hybrid. It was taken 15 or 16 years ago... but notice how closely he resembles the two white "Dire Wolves" shown in the plethora of videos about them on YouTube. The bigger, pointier ears. The muzzle. The white color. The massive bushy tail. The "wolf ruffs" on his jowls. The heavier fur.

As a side note, it's unlikely that actual Dire Wolves were white, and they were definitely not wolves. White is a color usually reserved for arctic animals who exist in snow most of the year. Dire Wolves were not arctic creatures for most of their time on Earth.

His name was Logan, and he weighed in at 145 pounds, just 5 pounds short of the projection for these wolves. Yeah, he was a big-un, but his sire was a full blooded Timber Wolf who weighed 160 pounds. His ma was, as i recall, a white german shepherd, which was at the time a relatively newly recognized breed in America, originally imported from Germany.



Logan was not a "Dire Wolf", despite his superficial but remarkably similar resemblance to these impostors.  He was a wolf-german shepherd hybrid. Nor did I ever claim he was anything but that, and that's really what pisses me off about this announcement. It's a lie, being broadcast far and wide in a effort to dupe a gullible public. That irritates me.

I did wonder where Colossal Biosciences got it's funding from, especially in light of the claims in their videos that they were either currently or planning to provide services freely to a variety of recipients. You don't get to do that without some pretty deep coffers, and being honest, no sane person is going to pay them to do their voodoo.

EndTheMadnessNow provided the answer to that query in the shoutbox, and it clears a lot of things up for me:

Colossal is connected at the hip to the globalist orgs such as UN, WEF, Wellcome Trust, Climate Change, apparently military too and have quite an elite board of advisors & scientists. Colossal co-founder is Prof. George Church. A world-renowned Harvard/MIT geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, Synthetic Biology scientist, and world leading transhumanist on a quest for immortality. He's attempting to create a new version of the human being. Billions upon billions have poured into his CRISPR research for past 10 years.

So, yeah, they are not doing this out of any sense of altruism (folks who lie to you are seldom altrusistic, eh?), they are doing it out of batshit craziness.

Dammit. This turned into one of my mega-rant posts after all!

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[Michigan Swamp Buck]

Clay and Buck were yapping about this yesterday and talking about the folly of the de-extinction of large predators, along the line of Jurassic Park, but they were on about Short-faced Bears and Sabre Toothed Cats. The one guy said he wasn't worried about the Doo Doo Bird coming back, but large predators were a problem.

I disagree. What if the Passenger Pigeon was brought back? That dirty destructive pest will make the ordinary city pigeon look like no problem at all. The filth and destruction they would cause when they roost is unimaginable in this day and age. People would plead for their removal and re-extinction after a few years of that.

They brought up the problems of messing with the food chain. Problems with things like my pigeon example. Bring back the pigeon and you need to bring back its natural predators and their predators and so on. Bring back a predator with no wild game to eat and they will eat what ever else they find, including people if necessary. Like the one character on Jurassic Park said, "They went extinct for a reason."

[sailorsam]

our ecosystem has adjusted to being post-megafauna.

the introduction of smilodon or cave bear could disrupt.  is there enough food for them?  might they force out existing animals?

I would love to see them bring back the Carolina Parakeet.  they have specimins in the Smithsonian and I'm sure they could find suitable hosts.  I understand they have sequenced the genome (whatever that means)

as I recall Dire Wolves are a lot bigger than today's wolves?

[F2d5thCav]

Ninurta, Logan was beautiful.

Back in World War II, the Nazis tried to "bring back" the aurochs by selective breeding of large cattle.  The descendants of these experiments live on, I think, in Scotland.

It is an old dream, a way of playing at being God by creating new species.

The "dire wolves" are IMO a baby step.  They can't do it for real ... yet.  They might succeed, some day.

[Ninurta]

our ecosystem has adjusted to being post-megafauna.

the introduction of smilodon or cave bear could disrupt.  is there enough food for them?  might they force out existing animals?

I would love to see them bring back the Carolina Parakeet.  they have specimins in the Smithsonian and I'm sure they could find suitable hosts.  I understand they have sequenced the genome (whatever that means)

as I recall Dire Wolves are a lot bigger than today's wolves?

Dire wolves were about 6 or 7 feet long and 3 1/2 feet tall at the shoulders, and weighed an average of 150 pounds. So they were maybe a foot or a foot and a half longer, and about a foot taller, than the average modern gray wolf, but still within range of gray wolves. I think it is the Mackenzie Valley Wolf that is the largest breed of timber wolf still in existence, and  dire wolves were about equal, but did not exceed on average, the Mackenzie Valley wolves in size.

Logan's father was a Mackenzie Valley wolf,which explains why he weighed 160 pounds, and explains why Logan was as big as he was, and weighed 140 pounds. Not a "Dire Wolf", just a really large breed of modern timber wolf.

The company has plans to resurrect the woolly mammoth as well, in order to reconstruct mammoth tundra in northern tundra regions, but that is not going to help the so-called "dire wolves" already in existence, and would be unlikely to help dire wolves in general, even if they managed to actually resurrect them. Mammoths are big critters, unlikely to have been a primary prey for dire wolves. I would guess that steppe bison of the "long horn bison" (Bison antiquus) were more likely the primary prey species for dire wolves, and no one seems to be planning to resurrect them, so any modern dire wolves would have to find a new prey species that is already in existence. that, too, is unlikely to happen - there is a reason dire wolves went extinct to begin with, and the consensus is that since they disappeared along with the megafauna, they were likely unable to adjust to other prey species, unlike the timber wolves, which did adjust.

Dire wolves also preyed upon other extinct animals, such as American camels, extinct American horses, giant ground sloths, and various antelopes that are no longer with us, etc. The closest current US cognates would be domestic horses, domestic cattle, domestic sheep, and plains bison I can only imagine the havoc a modern dire wolf population would wreak on those species, which would inevitably lead to bounties and re-extinction of dire wolves even if they were recreated.

The modern world is no longer the world dire wolves lived in. They would find themselves strangers in a strange land, with every man's hand set against them. Not a pretty picture.

Likewise any attempt to recreate smilodons or other saber toothed and scimitar toothed cats. Their prey no longer exists. Cave bears might be a different story. They have modern cognates in Kodiak bears, which seem to be doing ok. But since we already have Kodiak bears filling that office, why would we even need to resurrect cave bears?

American lions (panthera atrox) of the Pleistocene were about 25% larger than current African lions, and were the largest breed of lion to ever exist. Can you imagine the depredations on livestock and people that a resurrection of American lions would cause?

Ressurrection of extinct species might be fun for scientists trying to play at being gods, but it would not be so fun for the species involved, nor for the current species -incuding humans - that would have to contend with them.

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[Ninurta]

Ninurta, Logan was beautiful.

Back in World War II, the Nazis tried to "bring back" the aurochs by selective breeding of large cattle.  The descendants of these experiments live on, I think, in Scotland.

It is an old dream, a way of playing at being God by creating new species.

The "dire wolves" are IMO a baby step.  They can't do it for real ... yet.  They might succeed, some day.

Let's consider, for a moment, what they actually did. They tinkered with 20 base pairs at 20 sites on 14 genes. A wolf has around 2 1/2 billion base pairs to tinker with. If we assume that only 1/2 of 1% of the genomes of Dire wolves and gray wolves differed, then that is still 125 million base pairs that are different... but they only tinkered with TWENTY. Out of 125 million.

That's not a "de-extinction" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just the production of a GMO "designer" gray wolf.

In order to even be considered a hybrid, one would think that at least half of the differing base pairs would have to be derived from dire wolves, which would be 62.5 MILLION base pair tinkerings. And that's just for a hybrid.

20 base pairs rises to nowhere near the level of even a hybrid, much less an actual dire wolf.

They are lying to us. A generous person could only go so far as to say they are merely "hyping it up". I'm not generous. I say it's a flat out lie.

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