Woolly mice and "dire wolves" are a distraction from attacks on endangered species, experts caution

On April 7, Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company founded in Dallas in 2021 with the goal of “de-extincting” animals, announced it had brought back the dire wolf, a creature last seen in these parts around 10,000 years ago. That same day, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a proposal to the White House to weaken the Endangered Species Act by removing a single, vital word – “harm” – from the definition of what you can’t do to an endangered species. 

And two days later, during a livestreamed town hall on Wednesday, April 9, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, told department employees, now concerned about threatened weakening of the ESA, to just “pick your favorite species and call up Colossal,” explicitly tying the company’s latest success to a change that employees and other conservation experts fear would make it easier for companies or governments to degrade or destroy habitats.

“You want dodos?” Burgum went on, rhetorically. “Let’s bring them back. You want kiwis? Bring them back.” The kiwi bird is not yet extinct. Though theoretically humans may have genetic science down that we could rescue any imperiled species, from sea otters to monarch butterflies, this has yet to be fully demonstrated. The question remains if this is a better strategy, if it will even work, than preventing species from being swept into the dustbin of extinction in the first place.

Colossal Biosciences has been widely criticized for its somewhat huckster-ish style and the ease with which it’s captured the attention of people like Burgum and a prominent investors, a criticism that may reveal a touch of envy – as well as for making claims that inflate the actual science involved to the point it’s easy to pop. But the company is more than a pretty gimmick. 

Ben Lamm, the 43-year old who co-founded Colossal with synthetic biology pioneer George Church, a 70-year old genetics professor at Harvard and MIT, understands that ultimately, no press is bad press. What he wants the public to get though, is that behind the flashy image that has drawn wealthy and famous investors like honey draws flies, there is serious science, and a serious commitment to preventing the destruction of nature. 

Still, if it wants to be taken seriously when it says that conservation is as important an aspect of its work as de-extinction, the highly politicized times we live in mean that Colossal, and Lamm as its figurehead, are going to have to decide which side they’re on. This is something they have tried ardently to avoid.

The company has bounded into the spotlight on several previous occasions – when they were valued at $10.2 billion in January; with the proclamation in March of their first genetic modification poster mammal, the adorable, golden-furred, cold-adapted woolly mouse. But in April, Colossal announced a more substantial, still pretty cute achievement: the alleged de-extinction of the dire wolf, in the form of three wolfish pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. 

The dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) was a species of canine that lived in what is now North America during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs. It had evolved to specialize in hunting megafauna — oversized, cold-tolerant, plant-eating mammals like mammoths and giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers. To that end, the dire wolf was bigger than the grey wolves that existed at the same time, with large, shearing teeth carrying an extremely strong bite force. While the more flexible grey wolf is still around today, its large, dire cousin died out some 12,900 years ago, probably as a result of mass extinctions of the megafauna to which it was so well adapted. 

Dire wolf skeleton at La Brea tarpits museum. (Wikimedia Commons / Eden, Janine and Jim)As Colossal writes on its slickly Wired magazine-style website, "for many people, introduction to the dire wolf occurred through the lens of the world of entertainment, rather than the natural one. We find mention of this legendary prehistoric canid in role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons; video games, like 'ARK: Survival Evolved'; music, like the Grateful Dead’s aptly-named song, 'Dire Wolf'; and most notably, the best-selling novel, 'A Song of Ice and Fire,' and its TV adaptation, 'Game of Thrones.'"

While news of the dire wolf inspired Burgum to pitch de-extinction as an alternative to the Endangered Species Act, (what is perhaps the world's most successful pieces of legislation for preventing extinction), it soon also inspired something of a science media backlash. To put the scientific consensus in plain language, the reaction ran something along the lines of, "you haven't de-extincted squat." 

Other critiques have addressed the concrete implications of their approach for the extinction crisis in which, as Colossal correctly states, “is a colossal problem facing our world,” with roughly 150 species driven to extinction every day and up to half of all species predicted to go extinct by 2050. While not the most high profile among the critics, fantasy writer Ian Smith nevertheless addresses their argument neatly on his blog, when he writes of de-extinction that “it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense. It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.”

Lamm has brushed off these criticisms.

"Anytime you do something big and bold, you're gonna get criticism, right?" Lamm told Salon in a video interview. Colossal's chief animal officer, Matt James, was beside Lamm on the call. Lamm is a billionaire, with a net worth of $3.7 billion as of 2025, following the $10.2 billion valuation of Colossal. Church, the company’s geneticist cofounder, is not a billionaire and holds no equity in Colossal, according to reporting by Forbes. But “big” and “bold” are words that can be applied to the pair. Church, whose genomic sequencing methods inspired the Human Genome Project in the ‘80s, has long been known for his maverick approach to science. (He’s also founded around 25 biotech companies.) And the companies Lamm has founded share a hyperbolic, hyperactive naming trend: Hypergiant, Chaotic Moon, Team Chaos, and of course, Colossal.

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"You know, sometimes people say 'Well, scientists criticize you,'" Lamm went. "It's like, we also have 172 scientists, and we have 95 scientific advisors that are Nobel laureates and that are a part of the National Academy of Sciences. It's not like we're just a bunch of technologists over here.”

Lamm is correct. Colossal employs real life, highly-accomplished scientists. An obvious model or inspiration for Colossal's brash, ambitious, combative approach might be J. Craig Venter, who competed with the publicly financed Human Genome Project to be first to sequence the entire human genome — and ultimately proved that he could do what he promised. (But then, so could the Human Genome Project: both groups agreed that they reached the finish line together, in June of 2000). 

Like Venter, Lamm promises that the vast resources of his investors can do what publicly funded science cannot, and that he is willing to go where government scientists fear to tread. Like Venter back in the day, he also seeks (and, like Venter, Colossal’s scientists have probably earned) scientific legitimacy, even as he characterizes the scientific enterprise with its cooperative processes and excessive regulation as stuffy, bureaucratic and hopelessly timid.

Lamm uses the concept of open source software to explain to Salon what Colossal gives away for free (gene-editing and related techniques) and what he plans to turn a profit from: spinning off other companies, like Form Bio, which builds software for biologists to manage large data sets, and Breaking, which works on plastic degradation; by monetizing their gene editing and other techniques when applied to human health care; and by using these techniques, for governments who, instead of doing it themselves with publicly-funded scientists, might hire Colossal to carry out a conservation plan using these techniques in which they have experience, along with a willingness to think big, as Lamm might put it. He also hopes to get in on the developing market for biodiversity credits, and to patent software, wetware and hardware technology the company develops.

Ben Lamm speaks onstage at Featured Speaker: "Colossal's De-Extinction Mission is Just Beginning: A Conversation with Ben Lamm" during the 2023 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Hilton Austin on March 14, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Nicola Gell/Getty Images for SXSW)The aforementioned critics have pointed out that the dire wolf cubs are actually grey wolf cubs with slight modifications to their genome to make them exhibit traits associated with the dire wolf. Despite the framing of Colossal's announcement, Lamm says that's what they meant all along. And he's right here, too. As he points out, Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, has written a book called “How to Clone a Mammoth,” but has been clear she does not, in fact, believe you can clone a mammoth. You can, however, she argues, engineer one. 

Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi were engineered, or made to resemble dire wolves, using gene editing techniques like CRISPR. Colossal's scientists made 20 changes to a total of 14 genes out of the grey wolf's 19,000 total genes. Their choices of what to edit were based on their observations of two ancient samples of dire wolf bone (a tooth, a bit of inner ear bone) from individuals that lived over 60,000 years apart. No actual genetic material of ancient dire wolf forms part of the new creatures.

"That's always, always what we've always talked about," Lamm said. "We spent a lot of time and a lot of money on computational analysis and using AI to identify what genes were fixed in a dire wolf, or what genes were fixed in a mammoth. So if we were to make every change in an Asian elephant['s genome], probably a million changes, right? But there's about 85 genes that drive the core phenotypes, as well as the cold tolerance in the mammoth."

Functional de-extinction 

Lamm argues that the tree of life we're all familiar with is organized mostly on the basis of phenotype anyway. Phenotype means the way our genes are expressed. That is, not the genetic instructions in DNA themselves, but the things the DNA codes for: the long fur of a mammoth, for example, or the large stature typical of a dire wolf. It's true that the first evolutionary trees that attempted to show relationships between different groups over time mostly involved scientists organizing fossil skeletons on the basis of similarities in appearance, also using evidence from embryology and other evidence, like similar behaviors: classing a flying fox as closer to a bird because they both fly, for example.

But this is 2025. Scientists interested in evolution or conservation now understand that the genotype more accurately reflects evolutionary relationships. The familiar tree of life has therefore been rewritten to express this, with organisms that seem quite different revealed as having more similar genomes than superficially closer-seeming relatives. We understand, for example, that humans are genetically more closely related to dolphins than dolphins are to fish, that a flying fox is more closely related to a whale than to a bird, and that the property of flight in bats and birds arises from their ancestors adapting to similar environments, not from sharing a long evolutionary history. 

Meanwhile, proponents of gene editing tend to follow Venter's conception in which life is kind of like a great book (a database, actually) from which you can pick and choose whatever genes you want. (Last year, Colossal achieved the milestone of making 300 precision edits to a single cell in their pursuit of a “de-extincted” thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.) This, of course, throws the entire tree of life based on evolutionary relationships into disarray (as does the real-world prevalence of horizontal transfer, a process by which bacteria and viruses promiscuously trade bits of their genetic material.)

Perhaps more relevant is a simpler question. What use is cold tolerance on a heating planet? The outbreak of 150-year old anthrax that killed thousands of perfectly cold-adapted reindeer and one human in Siberia in 2016, for example, was largely the result of permafrost thawing along with pathogens in the frozen carcasses of dead reindeer, plus the sort of heat wave that is increasingly common in this closest thing to the woolly mammoth's ancestral biome.

It's not just Siberia and an engineered “woolly mammoth” we should worry about, though. According to new research, climate change has become the principal driver of species diversity decline in the United States. Researchers examined 2,766 imperiled U.S. species and five drivers of diversity loss to determine what most negatively affects the diversity of species within a given group, such as amphibians, for example. Although they separated drivers of species loss into those five categories, habitat loss, which is close behind, is really inseparable from climate change anyway due to multiple interactions between them. 

To their credit, Lamm and Shapiro are all too aware of the conservation issue. Lamm lists the ways in which Colossal is working right now on conservation initiatives, including a certain amount of traditional conservation work, such as their participation with local stakeholders in Mauritius and Tasmania to identify restoration areas where, for example, a de-extincted dodo or thylacine (both projects Colossal is working on) might live, and fencing or otherwise protecting these areas. More often, the initiatives involve attempts to genetically engineer greater robustness or diversity in endangered populations. (Technologically-speaking, Colossal works across the fields of computational biology, advanced embryology such as work to create artificial wombs, cellular engineering, multiplex editing, assembly of ancient DNA and cloning.) In October, Colossal raised $50 million to launch a non-profit, The Colossal Foundation, that will develop AI- and drone-based wildlife monitoring techniques, a global biobank to preserve tissue samples from endangered species, and other projects. (Matt James is its executive director). 

And Colossal is indeed using genome editing in fascinating ways. Work on the dire wolf, for example, resulted in figuring out how to isolate, gene edit, and clone endothelial progenitor cells from blood, allowing for the process to be done with a simple blood draw instead of the far more invasive tissue sample previously required for cloning. It's already being used for their red wolf conservation projects. The goal, they say, is not just to bring extinct creatures back to life, but to recover populations nearing extinction.

Genetic diversity crash

"From a population biologist perspective, we focus on this idea that for a robust group of individuals, you're looking for 50 unrelated animals, and that can recover a population with loads of genetic diversity," James explained to Salon. "Now, zoos that have been saving animals from extinction for decades have shown that you can actually go down lower than that: 25, five, in some cases, two, three individuals, because inbreeding is only bad if it results in negative alleles, right?"

James is likely referring to the concept of the "minimal viable population" that can allow a species to persist over time, and geneticist Ian Franklin's 50/500 rule, according to which "genetic effective population size should not be less than 50 in a short term and 500 in a long term" if the population is to persist without inbreeding depression. Other estimates of MVP, which more often vary by species, certainly can go lower than 50. But such estimates, like James' even lower ones, fail to take into account the devastating impact environmental catastrophes — including those like hurricanes, floods, wildfires or droughts, that are predicted to occur ever more frequently with global heating — can have on very small populations. Habitat loss could certainly fall into the category of the sort of catastrophe that could easily wipe out a tiny population, and species with reduced or fragmented habitats are also more vulnerable to other catastrophes.

As the multiple authors of a global map of species at risk of extinction due to environmental hazards noted in their publication in the journal PNAS last June, "species with advantageous sets of traits may still fail to recover after facing climatic or geological events if their populations have already declined to small numbers or have been confined to a small geographical area. This may especially be problematic if combined with degraded habitat and fragmented landscapes. Notably, human-modified landscapes often have restricted connectivity, which limits the ability of individuals to flee and establish populations in other locations."

Zoos, of course, provide climate-controlled and stable environments — but in the increasingly unstable real world, a population of three individuals is unlikely to get the chance to rebuild, even if gene editing has increased hardiness or restored some of the population's lost genetic diversity. The idea that a small, carefully selected or gene-edited set of individuals, so long as they don't have “harmful alleles” (harmful gene variants), might be the best way to rescue an endangered population has also been challenged, in part based on the fact that a gene variant that poses a problem in one environment might prove helpful in another.

"The whole thing seems like such a racket to me, like a circus sideshow is how I think of it," Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, told Salon in a video interview about the dire wolf and other de-extinction projects. 

Give and take

Under the ESA, a species is considered recovered if it meets a range of requirements for robustness. To get endangered species off the list, that is, they must no longer be endangered. And achieving that difficult task will become immeasurably more difficult if the proposed changes to the act happen. The legislation conservation experts are concerned about was actually proposed by the department’s Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and posted for comment April 17. Comments close May 19. Experts say if it passes, the Trump administration — represented by Burgum, when it comes to the ESA — will essentially make it impossible to protect the ecosystems endangered species inhabit. 

A paper published earlier this month takes a look at three decades of the ESA, pointing out multiple ways in which transparency and consistency have already been lacking in the Habitat Protection Plans required under the current legislation in order for any non-federal entity — such as a state, local or tribal government, or a private company — to be issued an “incidental take permit.” These permits protect them from legal liability if they, for example, kill an endangered (listed) animal in the process of carrying out an activity like developing land, extracting natural resources or generating energy.

This research suggests a need for better data management, more clarity, and better monitoring of these habitat protection plans — not making them unnecessary because “harm” done to an endangered species’ habitat has been removed from the definition of what you might need a take permit for. The Trump administration, however, would prefer to remove species from the list by simply … removing them from the list. Because habitat is a deeply political concept. Greenwald said that accommodating dire wolves is “preposterous.”

"Even if they had created dire wolves — which they didn't — it's just that, where are they going to live?" Greenwald said, noting that "We struggle to accommodate grey wolves on the current landscape."

“That leads right into what the Trump administration is doing. They have proposed to rescind the definition of harm that's been applied to the Endangered Species Act for over 40 years," Greenwald added.

This definition of harm, he explained, is really the heart of habitat protections in the ESA. This echoes a scathing statement put out by a subcommittee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission in April in response to the dire wolf announcement: "Editing the genome of a grey wolf to produce individuals that resemble an extinct species that has no ecological niche and that will not restore ecosystem function, does not follow the guiding principles on creating proxies of extinct species for conservation benefits put in place by the IUCN SSC. Indeed, creating phenotypic proxies of the dire wolf does not alter its conservation status, and may threaten the conservation status of extant species, like the grey wolf in the USA," the task force wrote. 

Colossal responded to the IUCN with a thread on X, which stated the organization and the IUCN SSC “share a common goal-to preserve biodiversity” and “far from undermining the urgency of efforts to conserve existing species, this project highlights the extraordinary effort needed to reverse such an extinction, underscoring the urgency to conserve existing species through habitat protection, population protection, and, if necessary, using modern genetic engineering tools like those developed through projects like this one.”

Lamm posted a letter on X clarifying Colossal’s stance and commitment to existing methods of conservation, including the vital importance of habitat. "Colossal was happy to meet with the Department of Interior to showcase how technologies can help protect existing species, engineer new resilience into species populations, and even bring back once recently lost species," he wrote. And Lamm told Salon that he has told Burgum “very clearly that we think that the Endangered Species Act is an important piece of legislation, and we agreed with it.”

Lamm told Salon that, in fact, “I don’t know Secretary Burgum as well as I think people think I do, but in my experience with him, he’s a huge conservationist.” This is a little disingenuous in light of detailed reporting in The Washington Post, science magazine Undark, and others. A New York Times article from last November quotes the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity as saying "Burgum will be a disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits." The story describes in detail Burgum's increasing embrace of oil and gas interests and his role in connecting petrochemical executives to Trump's second presidential campaign. 

And, as reported by TechCrunch in March, Lamm told audiences at SXSW that the company meets with federal government agencies on a quarterly basis and that the government has "invested" in Colossal — although he emphasized to Salon that “From our experience, because we also can’t speak for the Trump administration – we get no funding … We don’t have government contracts. We have no incentive there – Secretary Burgum is a big conservationist. And cares about conservation, at least in our experience.” Burgum’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.

"It's incredibly ill-timed that we have the Trump administration," Greenwald said. "We're facing these really serious twin crises of extinction and climate change. And I think people really fail to realize how intertwined they are ... I mean, burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause, but land clearance is up there with burning of fossil fuels as a cause of emissions and habitat destruction is also the biggest cause of extinction. And so both of these things really threaten to undermine our quality of life and the quality of life that future generations can expect to have. The time is now to address both of them ... We just don't have time for this. I see the dire wolf in that context of just this unfortunate sideshow to what really needs to happen, which is protecting more of the natural world and transitioning away from fossil fuels."

Interestingly, Lamm's argument for much of Colossal's work is exactly that: We don't have time. While some might see his approach as "move fast and break things," as coined by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lamm sees Colossal as doing what other scientific organizations lack the resources or the guts to do. It's not clear whether providing conservation services privately to desperate (or innovative) governments will divert scarce resources from national conservation budgets, but given the extremely inadequate resource allocation to conservation currently, it's hard to imagine that paying a private company isn't going to starve government research and conservation departments or institutes of resources, or put them out of work altogether. There’s also a lack of evidence, other than the extinction crisis itself, that conservation focused on habitat doesn’t work. 

Would Colossal’s investors — celebrities like Paris Hilton, Tony Robbins, and Peter Jackson, and companies and serial investors whose investments reflect their policy aims — be equally interested in supporting the company’s gene-editing-based and related conservation work if it didn't come with thylacines and woolly mammoths (or mice) and Pleistocene wolves better known for their role in “Game of Thrones?” Does it matter? 

It might, if some of those investors are using their influence and money to stymie meaningful action to protect existing species and their habitats. Church received an initial, though inadequate, $100,000 in seed money from Peter Thiel, a major donor to the U.S. political Right currently in power and working on eviscerating the ESA.

Now, though, cryptocurrency-focused Winklevoss brothers are big investors, as is TWG Global, whose Gecko Robotics has holdings in oil and gas among other habitat-destroying industries. Gecko's partners, along with the U.S. Air Force and Navy, include a host of other petrochemical companies. Three years ago, the CIA decided it was in their interest to invest in Colossal, by means of their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

We're in a moment in which science in or funded by the United States is threatened as never before. Increasingly, Salon and other publications are encountering scientists anxious about anything they might say that could result in funding being denied to research projects or cut from their institutions. As a company not dependent upon such funding, Colossal is perhaps in a unique position of influence and safety to speak out. It's one thing to play at conservation, arguing correctly, as Lamm does, that historically both Republicans and Democrats have initiated or strengthened important legislation to protect species and their habitats. It's another to be fully aware that just as we're no longer in the Pleistocene, we're also no longer in the 20th century, and it is disingenuous to maintain that ideology and influence are not putting the entire planet on the path to loss of hundreds of thousands of species in coming decades. (The Center for Biological Diversity says one species becomes extinct every hour, while on their website Colossal puts the figure at six per hour.)

Incidentally, the kiwi that Burgum suggested Colossal might bring back has a current population of about 68,000 individuals — a far cry from the original 12 million. According to Save the Kiwi, the bird owes its current non-extinct status to “management.”  That is, conservation of the traditional kind. As it faces habitat loss and fragmentation of its remaining habitat as well as the ravages of invasive species like domestic dogs, unmanaged kiwi populations are continuing to decline by 2% every year. 

By contrast, “In areas where kiwi are being managed, the situation is improving and many populations are stable or increasing. These places include Department of Conservation kiwi sanctuaries, community-led projects (many of them sponsored by Save the Kiwi), and offshore island sanctuaries,” the environmental organization writes on their website.

Perhaps fittingly, one of Colossal investor TGW Global’s partners is the fossil fuel company HF Sinclair Corporation, which appropriates a dinosaur as a logo and is listed as DINO on the New York Stock Exchange. Whether we should see this as a neat bit of symbolism about de-extinction or a defiant, stubborn reference to industries that ought to have died out long ago is an open question.