Three days ago, Time Magazine broke the alleged story that Colossal Biosciences had “de-extincted” the direwolf. But that’s not true. On their cover, Time struck through the word “Extinct” and claimed Remus, their canine photo subject, was “the first [direwolf] to exist in over 10k years,” writing in their story that the company had “for the first time, effectively… [reanimated] a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.” But these claims do not hold up to scrutiny, and the misleading framing of the story has drawn criticism from scientists and journalists alike.

How to de-extinct a direwolf, a tutorial: To make the three puppies at the center of attention, the scientists at Colossal manufactured a partial direwolf genome from prehistoric fossils of the species and edited the DNA of existing gray wolf embryos to include traits found in their samples. Actual direwolf DNA was not used except only to act as a guideline for which gray wolf genes to edit to exhibit distinctive direwolf traits. “This is not a de-extincted direwolf,” Co-director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory Nic Rawlence told the New Zealand Science Media Center. “It’s a hybrid.”

Experts say that the newly created animals are only like direwolves in appearance. Why? Gray wolves and direwolves aren’t actually that closely related. “New information shows that the original direwolf itself was not really a wolf,” said David Mech, wolf ecology and behavior specialist and research scientist, to Live Science. Not only are direwolves a different species from gray wolves, but a completely different genus. “Colossal compared the genomes of the direwolf and the gray wolf, and from about 19k genes, they determined that 20 changes in 14 genes gave them a direwolf,” Rawlence said.

Bad marketing… Colossal’s own claims were misleading, reporting on their own site that they had “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction” and boasting that “after a 10k+ year absence, [the] team is proud to return the direwolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” After claiming that the gray wolf was chosen to be the host for direwolf traits due to the two animals being “genetically really similar,” the biotech company admitted in a blog update this morning that direwolves “haven’t had a genetically-similar relative in mns of years.”

…and bad reporting. News outlets publishing articles titled “The Return of the Direwolf” and “ How a Des Moines professor helped de-extinct the dire wolf ” or “ The Dire Wolf is Back ” are complicit in the spreading of misinformation for the sake of a catchy headline. The erosion of public trust is increasingly becoming an issue in the age of the internet — readers are losing confidence in media institutions, with many journalists noting a “ trust recession ” making people skeptical of all information sources. A study published in November of 2024 revealed that more than 75% of the time, a link was circulated without being clicked on or read. Contributing to the repeated exposure of a false claim to garner engagement is not only disingenuous, but will have long-term effects on the credibility of the news and science industries.

It’s still breakthrough technology, just not how we are being told it would be. The puppies signify the “wholesale creation of a new species,” said science communicator and YouTuber Hank Green, which signifies revolutionary breakthroughs in fields like genome engineering and embryology. While Colossal seems determined to use this technology to “bring back” extinct animals, Philip Seddon, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago, suggests that the technology “might have applications for the conservation of existing [endangered] species.”

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