It turns out dire wolves were real. And a company now claims to have de-extincted them.

Hey, Sloppos. (Slop Army? What are we calling Brain Slop readers?)

I learned two pretty major things last week. The first is that dire wolves were a real animal that actually existed, living in the Americas between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago. It turns out that they weren’t just the creation of George R. R. Martin for his A Song of Ice and Fire series. This whole time I’ve just assumed dire wolves were fictional creatures like the Chupacabra, unicorns or the brontosaurus.

The second big thing I learned last week is that a company called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences has allegedly brought the dire wolf — which, I should reiterate, went extinct approximately 10,000 years ago — back to life.

On October 1, 2024, for the first time in human history, Colossal successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction. After a 10,000+ year absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem. Colossal’s innovations in science, technology and conservation made it possible to accomplish something that's never been done before: the revival of a species from its longstanding population of zero.

Time published a major profile of Colossal and its three dire wolves, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, on Monday.

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter — effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.

This is the second splash that Colossal has made over the past few weeks. The company was in the news last month when they announced that they had created the wooly mouse, a mouse with some of the genetic traits of a wooly mammoth. (Think a lot of fur, not massive tusks.) The wooly mouse and the dire wolf are all part of Colossal work to eventually bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction.

“Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, told Time. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct.”

Not everyone agrees with Colossal’s insistence that these animals are their long-extinct relatives back from the dead.

“Dire wolves were not close relatives of gray wolves,” Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and When the Earth Was Green wrote on Bluesky. “They last shared a common ancestor more than 5 million years ago. What Colossal has done is make something new and slapped a dire wolf sticker on it, as if an organism equals a hypothetical genome.”

Black has previously written about dire wolves, publishing a piece on Scientific American back in January 2021 about how the extinct animals “were not wolves at all, but rather the last of a dog lineage that evolved in North America.”

“Colossal’s ‘dire wolves’ are the Cybertruck of genetics,” she added on Monday.

Despite the coverage last week triumphantly declaring that Colossal had de-extincted the dire wolf, the company quietly acknowledges that the animals that they’re bringing back from the dead aren’t the same thing as the original species.

No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro.

But that might be a distinction without a difference. If it looks like a mammoth and behaves like a mammoth and, if given the opportunity to breed with another engineered elephant with mammoth-mimicking DNA, produces a baby mammoth, it’s hard to say that the species hasn’t been brought back from the dead. “Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” says Shapiro. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct.”

Also adding to the growing ickiness about this announcement? That revelation that Martin, whose books have been adapted into Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, is an investor in Colossal.

All this talk of bringing extinct animals back to life means I have to recommend Tusks of Extinction, a short novel by Ray Nayler. (The Mountain in the Sea and Where the Axe Is Buried, Nayler’s first two full-length novels, are two of my favorite books from the past few years.) I won’t spoil too much of Tusks of Extinction, but let’s just say it might involve a scientist’s “digitalized consciousness” being “downloaded” into the mind of a resurrected mammoth.

📖 The Return of the Dire Wolf (Jeffrey Kluger, Time)

Programming note

Brain Slop will be off next Sunday, April 20. The newsletter will return on April 27.

the links

media

• The Only Men Allowed to Podcast Are Tween Boys (E.J. Dickson, The Cut): “It feels a bit like watching Joe Rogan, except cursing isn’t allowed and the discussion topics are about Double Stuf Oreos instead of ivermectin and ayahuasca.”

tech

• Please break up with your AI lover (Jennifer Wright, The Washington Post): “The point of intimacy is not just to see how much praise or sex you can get from someone. What makes relationships satisfying is giving to someone else. You cannot give anything to an AI companion that will substantially improve its life, because — and this feels obvious — it is not alive.”
• Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker): “Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales.”
• Nintendo Is ‘Actively Assessing’ What a Trade War Means for the Switch 2 (Megan Farokhmanesh, Wired): “If tariffs force Nintendo’s hand, the company may find it harder to win over players than ever before. However, it’s unlikely Nintendo will face that dilemma alone. In an interview with IGN last Friday, ESA spokesperson Aubrey Quinn said that if people believe only the Switch 2 will be affected, ‘then we aren’t taking it seriously. This is going to have an impact.’”
  • Why Nintendo can get away with a $450 Switch 2 price (Sean Hollister, The Verge): “But can Nintendo justify charging 50 percent more for a new handheld eight years later? That’s where I’m less sure. While US inflation might help justify a $400 Switch (again, the $300 original Switch would cost nearly $400 in today’s money) or even a $80 game, I think it’s more that Nintendo can afford to get away with a $450 Switch because real competition is slim.”
• Nintendo delays Switch 2 pre-orders in Canada (Bradly Shankar, MobileSyrup): “It remains to be seen when pre-orders will eventually open for the U.S. and Canada. We’re also still waiting for official confirmation of Switch 2 games and accessories pricing.”

science & nature

• Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals (Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine): “‘A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. ‘How is it possible?’”
• In Search of the Last Wild Axolotls (Anna Lagos, Wired): “Everything indicates that for the axolotl, the countdown to extinction continues. But there is one last hope. Scientists from the Ecological Restoration Laboratory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who are in charge of the axolotl census, are seeking to reverse this trend and conserve one of the oldest terrestrial vertebrates on the planet.”

• Dinosaurs Weren’t Fading Before the Asteroid — We Just Suck at Finding Their Fossils (Adam Kovac, Gizmodo): “For decades, scientists have argued both for and against the idea that extinction rates among dinosaurs were accelerating towards the end of their reign. Those who believe dinosaurs were dwindling claim that new species were appearing with less frequency compared to previous eras.”

sports

• Dwyane Wade’s Greatest Challenge (D. Watkins, The Atlantic): “I imagined how strange it must be for Wade: all these white faces celebrating you as one of their own. No one else in that room had once been a skinny Black kid who lived where Wade lived and saw what he saw. He gave them a story they could comprehend — the truth, but not the truth.”

food

• Is the Restaurant Good? Or Does It Just Look Good? (Priya Krishna, The New York Times): “‘Everything is branding nowadays,’ said Mr. Ramirez, who owns two other Peruvian restaurants in New York City. For diners, ‘I feel like the food element is kind of an after thought.’”
• Does beef tallow really make better french fries? We put it to the test. (Emily Heil, The Washington Post): “One taster mused that the beef-flavored fries would be great alongside a burger, and another suggested it would shine on a dish of steak frites — but one wondered whether the combination might be overkill — “too beef-on-beef” — or whether you might lose the more subtle notes of the fries in those scenarios.”

space

• Scientists Get Real About the Chances for Alien Life on Saturn’s Moon Titan (Adam Kovac, Gizmodo): “However, just as an egg yolk is not a chicken, organic compounds don’t necessarily indicate that life can form.”

a cartoon