After 10,000 years, Dire Wolf brought back from extinction

[Bobfripp]

An anthropologist friend of mine contends that far from being the troglodytic brutes that Neanderthals are often depicted as, they were actually the sensitive artistic types that got wiped out by the more thuggish and aggressive Homo sapiens and naturally I agree with her. Basically Homo sapiens were the Magas of the Late Pleistocene era. Or maybe I should say the MANGA's (make the Neander Valley great again)...

 

[Zoo_View]

Way too fit and muscular.

 

[evrheel]

Experts dispute Colossal claim dire wolf back from extinction

Independent experts say three white wolf puppies are not dire wolves, as claimed by US company Colossal

www.bbc.com

But while the young wolves - Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi - represent an impressive technological breakthrough, independent experts say they are not actually dire wolves.

Zoologist Philip Seddon from the University of Otago in New Zealand explained the animals are "genetically modified grey wolves".

Colossal publicised its efforts to use similar cutting edge genetic techniques to bring back extinct animals including the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger.

Meanwhile experts have pointed to important biological differences between the wolf on the cover of Time and the dire wolf that roamed and hunted during the last ice age.

"It's in a completely different genus to grey wolves," he said. "Colossal compared the genomes of the dire wolf and the grey wolf, and from about 19,000 genes, they determined that 20 changes in 14 genes gave them a dire wolf."

 

[dcf2]

Agree - these are GMO Grey Wolves using technologies that have been applied in mice for many years. Editing many genes is a lot of work so this was not trivial.