De-extinction was big news in 2025 – but didn’t live up to the hype

Colossal Biosciences, which calls itself “the world's first and only company to resurrect extinct species,” has generated plenty of headlines this year. However, the hype had little to do with reality.

Firstly, the American company made a splash with its woolly mice “designed to express many key mammoth traits.” Victoria Herridge at the University of Sheffield, UK, noted bluesky The long-haired mice that were photographed all over the media were not the result of gene editing based on mammoth DNA, and that geneticists had been creating long-haired mice for decades. Mice with more gene changes associated with mammoths looked less mammoth-like.

Then came the big event: the world's first de-extinction, according to company press release. Colossal claimed to have brought back the dire wolf (Oenocyon dirus), a wolf-like beast that lived in the Americas before going extinct about 10,000 years ago. In fact, Colossal made 20 small changes to the gray wolf genome (dog lupus) cells, only 15 of which were based on the dire wolf genome, and then cloned the modified cells to produce three wolf cubs.

Since there are millions of genetic differences between the two species, this is a tiny step toward making gray wolves more similar to dire wolves. It's very, very far from Jurassic Park-style of creating exact genetic copies of extinct species.

Most media outlets reported the species' resurrection claim without reservation. New scientist was one of the very few who categorically rejected this: “No, the direwolf could not be brought back from extinction.“,” was our headline.

Chief Researcher of Colossal, Beth Shapiro tried to justify the resurrection claim on the basis of appearance. “We use the concept of morphological species and say: if they look like this animal, then they are the animal,” she said. New scientist April 7.

But even putting aside the enormous genetic differences, it is unclear whether the cloned gray wolves actually resemble the extinct animal. “There is no evidence that genetically modified animals are phenotypically different from the gray wolf and phenotypically resemble the dire wolf.” An expert group on canids from the International Union for Conservation of Nature said April 18.

In a second interview with New scientist, even Shapiro herself seemed to agree with this. “It's impossible to bring back something identical to a species that was previously alive. Our animals are gray wolves with 20 changes that are cloned,” she said. “And we've said it from the beginning. They're colloquially called dire wolves, and that makes people angry.”

In response to our article citing Shapiro, Colossal released a statement reiterating its claim: “With these changes, we have brought back the dire wolf.”

However, other than those who work at Colossal, New scientist I don't know of a single biologist who believes the direwolf has made a comeback. “As far as I know, there is no reason to call these transgenic gray wolves dire wolves,” says Vincent Lynch at the University at Buffalo, New York. “At least in the circles in which I find myself, there is a consensus that these allegations are unfounded.”

Lynch believes that most non-biologists believe this statement because the media constantly repeats it as fact. He and others worry that the belief that extinct animals can be brought back to life will undermine support for conservation of endangered species.

“People absolutely believed these claims, but it's extremely difficult to say what this will mean for conservation efforts in the long term,” Herridge says.

In July, Colossal said it also Bring back the moa, New Zealand's flightless bird. Critics including Nick Rawlens from the University of Otago, New Zealand, said the best the company could do was create “Franken-moa” it might look a bit like an extinct bird.

Meanwhile, Rawlance, Lynch, Herridge and other prominent critics of Colossal's resurrection efforts were under threat. mysterious smear campaign something the company says it is not involved in. Anonymous blog posts and videos have appeared online criticizing their experience and credentials. Lynch says it ended after New scientist reported this on July 31, but another figure attacking Rawlance appeared on September 5, and Herridge saw another dubious article.

Even Colossal's critics agree that the company has made significant progress. But Richard Grenier at the University of Oxford believe that all talk of resurgence is a distraction from the larger problems posed by our growing ability to make large-scale changes to animal genomes. “We probably need to have another discussion as a society about what we will tolerate and what we won't,” he says.

“There may be some specific cases where these kinds of technologies are used to genetically rescue narrow populations that may have some conservation value, but they will always be very niche and very expensive.”