On April 7th, 2025, Dallas-based de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences flooded major news outlets, LinkedIn newsfeeds, and Instagram reels with a big announcement. They had resurrected the dire wolf, a large Pleistocene canid related to grey wolves, jackals, and African wild dogs that has been extinct for roughly 10,000 years. Their promotional material featured Romulus and Remus, two snow white wolf pups, chasing each other through meadows, adorning a Time Magazine cover, and even in the arms of Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm. Social media was filled with thousands of awestruck comments, some focused on the power of science, others proudly displaying their Martin fandom declaring that “Winter is coming.” This announcement came as the latest installment in an increasingly grand set of results and research plans from the George Church firm that wishes to bring back mammoths to stave off the possible runaway greenhouse gas emissions from tundra.  

THIS IS NOT A HIT PIECE ON PUPPIES (Credit: Colossal Biosciences)

Undoubtedly, the dire wolf announcement had the greatest mainstream reach of any Colossal press release. But the announcement was controversial: waves of conservationists, carnivore biologists, and palaeontologists responded to the news, begging the company to take the implications of their work more seriously. Their concerns (summarized here by science communicator Hank Green) primarily focused on the truthfulness of Colossal’s claims and the impact they could have on conservation as a whole. People were also concerned with the ethics of creating a social animal and depriving it of a social life, a serious topic deserving of its own essay. All critiques were met with firm dismissal from official representatives. 

The dire wolf project was a scientific advance, but to a greater extent it was a branding project. Its purpose was to incept Colossal’s corporate vision into the minds of people who had never heard of the company, on terms controlled by Colossal. It tried to accomplish this not by introducing a product (no direwolves will ever be introduced into modern ecosystems), but through concept art that familiarizes us with the technology and goals of the organization, similar to how a Mercedes concept vehicle helps us understand Mercedes’ identity and grandest visions. The problem is Colossal’s failure to acknowledge their project as merely concept art:

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. 

There was no ambiguity in Colossal’s claim of dire wolf resurrection, but this declaration was divorced from the real (and impressive) achievements of the project. In short, the team at Colossal used the genome of the grey wolf– which shares 99.5% of its DNA with the dire wolf but still has ~12,235,000 individual genetic differences– and made mere 20 edits across 14 genes that were meant to produce dire wolf characteristics. This array of edits consisted of some modifications that directly recreated dire wolf genetic features and some that were meant to create dire wolf-like traits, including a white coat which the Colossal team suggested was supported by research findings that had not been made public. Herein lies the first problem: Colossal took significant creative liberties with this project that aligned more tightly with the media-inspired public perception of a dire wolf than the paleontological reality of this animal. They started with a genome that was significantly divergent from the animal they wished to resurrect and made a small handful of modifications amounting to at most 0.2% restoration of the 12 million nucleotide differences (using a realistic upper limit of 2000 base pairs for average gene size and assuming complete replacement across 14 genes) between the starting genome and the dire wolf reference. Some of these modifications were speculative (coat color), not using specific dire wolf DNA sequences at all. Some, while biologically supported, will not yield verifiable results for several more months (increased final size and musculature). 

Artist rendition of conflict between C. lupus and A. dirus (Credit: Mauricio Antón)

There is a real story about an impressive synthetic biology project involving a genetically-modified grey wolf that the world will never hear because of Colossal’s choice to frame the project purely through the lens of de-extinction. Maybe the leadership team believed a GMO grey wolf would fall flat in the media (like the woolly mouse), or maybe they feared losing control of the narrative if a more nuanced discussion of synthetic species invited accusations of “playing God” (which happened anyway). Whatever the rationale, Colossal dismissed more widely-accepted models of speciation and de-extinction in favor of oversimplified ones that relied primarily on aesthetics and core genes, respectively. They then incorrectly deemed their work authentic within that model– we don’t actually know what dire wolves looked like– as a way of generating pop-sci notoriety and House Stark nostalgia.

We've seen this movie before. In ignoring the science to create a fantasy beast, Colossal can be viewed before the backdrop of Hammond dismissing the paleontologists to create his velociraptor: like those raptors, these unfortunate puppies are likely to become the villains of their story. Shortly after Colossal’s announcement and the somewhat surprising run of sponsored media content in major publications, the Trump administration seized the opportunity to use Colossal’s narrative in support of the President’s policy agenda. US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum mischaracterized the long tenure of threatened species on the Endangered Species List as a bureaucratic failure to adjust to modern realities. He referenced Colossal’s statement that de-extinction was the most important tool in biodiversity preservation, asserting that this technological advance would allow the administration to cut the red tape preventing the reduction and eventual elimination of the list altogether.

Adopting the view of extinction as a problem from a bygone era that we can solve through cloning and less stringent record-keeping enables a three-stage assault on biodiversity:

1. Sever the mental and legal associations the American public and policy-makers have between human land use and animal conservation.

2. De-protect public lands that serve as habitats to endangered species, under the argument that their numbers can be buffered using technology alone. This results in the removal of penalties for harming these species, reduced federal funding for tracking population sizes, and allowance of direct hunting and exploitation of wild populations.

3. Increase access to these lands for extractive industries by giving out more permits for resource exploitation, reducing pollution standards for companies with ongoing operations in these lands, and wholesale privatization of public lands.

Perhaps when the pups were born last October Colossal expected a different electoral outcome and neglected to pivot their marketing strategy when the new administration took office. Regardless, Colossal now has two choices: they can stick to their guns to defend a narrative about their work that is not supported by factual reality, or retract and reframe the big-picture statements they made about their dire wolf restoration project. Both choices have huge downsides. If they continue to get embroiled in petty debates with scientists in the comments of YouTube videos and Reddit posts, the large-scale reality of animal conservation will get far worse because of the policy fallout they will have helped precipitate. The Trump administration's disdain for the ESA was a feature his first term, and their newly-proposed rule to eliminate the definition of "harm" as it pertains to habitat destruction has an undeniable link to Colossal's announcement that the de-extinction company should have foreseen. But if Colossal admits that this whole exercise was an episode of Brands Gone Wild, they play into the political right’s narrative about the venality of science. Today, only 65% of polled Americans view scientists as “honest”, and overall confidence in science has slipped 10 percentage points from 86 percent to 76 percent in the last six years. The choice to market this project the way they did was a choice to advance concerns about the integrity of science. To launch this media campaign at this moment avoidably widened the path toward a plethora of completely unacceptable and wholly predictable outcomes.

Credit: Pew Research Center

Colossal dramatically misunderstood both the audience they were speaking to and the times we live in, but it's easy to admire their goals. The biodiversity crisis is a sweeping parallel crisis to climate change with some incomprehensibly-massive impact scales and different enough root causes to warrant its own full attention. As a full time animal lover who knows that the worst outcomes of species loss will profoundly affect humans in ways that are hard for many to imagine, I cheer for anyone who has dedicated their lives to finding solutions– traditional or innovative– to this issue. The aesthete in me is neurologically delighted when I poke around on Colossal’s website and see the slick design bringing attention to the single issue I care most about with many blurbs of copy I deeply agree with and a smattering of badges for partner organizations I support. And even further than that, I think de-extinction is worth our time to develop and can be a powerful tool in select cases, such as Colossal's own red wolf project. But inappropriate branding can undo the good work the scientific community has fought for on multiple fronts, and it’s irresponsible to not call out that harm.

There are ways to use de-extinction as a branding tool that don't endanger science. The synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks (full disclosure: I worked for them for a number of years) had a branding project called the Extinct Flower. The premise is summarized here: There is a flower from Maui that recently went extinct, but is preserved by Harvard’s specimen collection. Ginkgo partnered with Harvard and others to sequence this lost Hibiscus flower’s DNA and reconstruct the flower’s genome. This sequence information allowed Ginkgo to guess the fragrance molecules the Hibiscus produced. By mixing those molecules in different compositions, they generated a bunch of hypotheses for what this flower could have smelled like. The ratios of components in the mixtures created a range of very different output experiences, similarly to how different mixtures of two pigments can yield dramatically varying paint colors. Modern people may never know exactly what Hibiscadelphus wilderianus truly smelled like, but this project allowed them to imagine it anyway.

Hibiscadelphus wilderianus (Credit: National Geographic)

This project did not claim the resurrection of an organism as it canonically existed, but Ginkgo asserted that biological realism wasn’t the thing that made this project special or interesting. When Ginkgo “revived” an extinct flower, their goal was for people to feel the magic and wonder of their science. Olfactory signals can trigger deep emotional responses from people, so by creating something novel and telling a story that related the experience to a time and place on Earth, they hoped to inspire appreciation for technology’s part in that story. This focus on journey over destination is retained in the product copy for the fragrance today: 

Through science and art, this extinct flower has been given new life. Biotechnology unveiled key scent molecules, which were then interpreted into this unique composition through the creativity and expertise of the perfumer.

When the project was conceptualized in 2016, most people had an even more sparse understanding of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) than they do today. Many people with familiarity viewed the benefits as ambiguous at best, and largely felt that playing fast and loose with genetic engineering would get people eaten. Peeling back the Spielberg influence there were reasons for genuine distrust: Monsanto was the only famous GMO company and they had created genuine monsters. The ghosts of these monsters were the loud, proud “non-GMO project” logos haunting the labels of sugar- and microplastic-filled products on every grocery store shelf in America. The Extinct Flower project was a dialogue about both Jurassic Park and Monsanto, incorporating the concepts of de-extinction and GMO agriculture into an art project about using science playfully to understand the world. It was a direct response to the dangers society feared, limits it perceived, and solemn, humorless attitude people had towards GMO research.

Branding is an important tool. Used effectively, a company in a new or poorly-understood issue area can acknowledge the box society has created for it and can gently push against the walls of that box to make a little bit more space in the world for their work. Ginkgo used de-extinction for brand advancement knowing that genetic engineering was neither loved nor trusted, and it aimed to address that emotional reality while being forthright about the science. It was branding for the purpose of making their science more familiar, acceptable, and fun. Colossal’s failure to anticipate the realities of their moment has had the opposite effect. Their narrative stripped conservation and extinction of both its complexity and intersectionality in a moment where we are governed by decision-makers who have a knack for twisting simple narratives in their favor. Telling the wrong stories to the wrong people has real consequences for the storyteller. Colossal launched a marketing campaign at the expense of their science, and we’re all worse off for it.

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