The company Colossal Biosciences from the United States will be able to de-distinguish species in the future, perhaps, they intend to de-distinguish species like the dodo bird or the Tasmanian tiger or the mammoth, although it will depend on the amount of money that flows to their laboratories, because this story is about raising funds by selling us a glorious objective, de-distinguishing species, some of which disappeared directly due to human action.
What is Colossal Biosciences then pursuing with all this, as Indiana Jones said in the Temple of Doom “fortune and glory child, fortune and glory”, the question is, are their methods acceptable or are they selling us a fraud?
On Monday, April 7, 2025, Colosal published a video explaining the process that gave rise to the birth of three genetically modified gray wolf pups, which had some genes from the ancient dire wolf.
On Tuesday, Time magazine put on its cover a magnificent snow-white wolf accompanied by a headline that announced the return of the dire wolf and also related it to the Dire wolf that appeared in the Game of Thrones series, although the wolf from Game of Thrones as well as the Dragons were fantastic animals, while the dire wolf existed more than 10,000 years ago in America.
In a publication the company states this:
That is the epic tone with which Colosal presented their achievement and although I am critical of what they have done, as are many experts from all over the world, I confess that with Colosal it happens to me like those characters in adventure movies who are canayas, fortune seekers, cheaters, but with a good heart who in the end put their skills at the service of a heroic cause and end up saving the day and thereby repay their sins by becoming better people.
With Colosal, something similar to those rogue heroes from adventure movies happens to me because those who work on the subject of the genetics of current and past species know perfectly well that those from Colosal are exaggerating, they are cheating and that they love to raise money, but also that they are developing techniques from Colosal that in the end may be useful to recover lost species, but at the moment that is more than doubtful.
why do I say all this? One of Colossal's arguments is to want to recover extinct species. In fact, in their writings they remember that right now we are experiencing a mass extinction, citing that if we continue on the same trajectory, half of the species currently alive will be extinct by the year 2050, transforming our current era into one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.
If your desire is to avoid this disaster or alleviate it at least in part, why not start by de-extinct species that have recently become extinct and of which a large genetic material should be conserved and that will have species close to them and also whose ecosystems still exist or could be recovered with relative ease, for example, the Vietnamese Javan rhinoceros became extinct in 2010 or the Baijí Dolphin, the last of these beautiful animals died in 2006.
And there are dozens of other species that have been lost in the last 50 years, but no, the first thing that they have supposedly distinguished is a wolf from the ice age that also receives the shocking title of dire wolf that looks great for the headlines and the media and can also be associated with the Direwolves from Game of Thrones, the mythical series.
