The "Dire Wolves" Are Grown Now — and There's Nowhere for Them to Go
Claw Files
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The first time Colossal's "dire wolves" caught a rabbit, they brought it back alive. A year and a half after a Texas biotech company introduced Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi as the world's first "de-extinct" animals, the white wolves are grown, chasing deer, and more pups are on the way. So where is an animal like that supposed to live?
This film follows how the wolves were made from a vial of gray wolf blood, what the company's own chief scientist says they really are, and why they will spend their lives behind a fence, next to four cloned "ghost wolves" that carry the DNA of America's own red wolf. Then it goes back to the first time America actually opened the gate for a wolf that had vanished from the wild: the red wolf of North Carolina, down to seven in the wild in 2020 and back to twenty-one adults today.
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Sources: Colossal Biosciences; TIME; MIT Technology Review; La Brea Tar Pits and Museum; IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Princeton University; Coastal Review; PERC.
0:00 The rabbit they didn't kill
0:50 Made from a vial of blood
1:34 Gray wolves with twenty edits
3:15 Now they hunt
3:55 Three square miles
4:39 A fence for life
5:15 The lost world of the dire wolf
6:02 Ghost wolves
8:30 The gate America opened
10:36 Wolves don't read maps
12:01 Seven, then twenty-one
12:51 A place to live
Photographs: iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons contributors under CC BY / CC BY-SA — full list in the pinned comment. Press photographs and portraits: Colossal Biosciences, TIME, University of Maine, Houston Chronicle (Ron Wooten). Archival red wolf photographs: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Dire wolf mural: Charles R. Knight, 1921, public domain. Dire wolf skull model: UIPaleoRepository, Sketchfab, CC Attribution. Maps: USGS, Natural Earth, © OpenStreetMap contributors. Aerial flyovers: Google Earth Studio. Wolf audio: Zoe O., iNaturalist, CC BY. Animal clips were generated from the photographs above with AI (Veo 3.1).
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The "Dire Wolves" Are Grown Now — and There's Nowhere for Them to Go
Claw Files
886 views
The first time Colossal's "dire wolves" caught a rabbit, they brought it back alive. A year and a half after a Texas biotech company introduced Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi as the world's first "de-extinct" animals, the white wolves are grown, chasing deer, and more pups are on the way. So where is an animal like that supposed to live?
This film follows how the wolves were made from a vial of gray wolf blood, what the company's own chief scientist says they really are, and why they will spend their lives behind a fence, next to four cloned "ghost wolves" that carry the DNA of America's own red wolf. Then it goes back to the first time America actually opened the gate for a wolf that had vanished from the wild: the red wolf of North Carolina, down to seven in the wild in 2020 and back to twenty-one adults today.
Subscribe for more true stories about what happens when people try to fix nature.
Sources: Colossal Biosciences; TIME; MIT Technology Review; La Brea Tar Pits and Museum; IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Princeton University; Coastal Review; PERC.
0:00 The rabbit they didn't kill
0:50 Made from a vial of blood
1:34 Gray wolves with twenty edits
3:15 Now they hunt
3:55 Three square miles
4:39 A fence for life
5:15 The lost world of the dire wolf
6:02 Ghost wolves
8:30 The gate America opened
10:36 Wolves don't read maps
12:01 Seven, then twenty-one
12:51 A place to live
Photographs: iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons contributors under CC BY / CC BY-SA — full list in the pinned comment. Press photographs and portraits: Colossal Biosciences, TIME, University of Maine, Houston Chronicle (Ron Wooten). Archival red wolf photographs: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Dire wolf mural: Charles R. Knight, 1921, public domain. Dire wolf skull model: UIPaleoRepository, Sketchfab, CC Attribution. Maps: USGS, Natural Earth, © OpenStreetMap contributors. Aerial flyovers: Google Earth Studio. Wolf audio: Zoe O., iNaturalist, CC BY. Animal clips were generated from the photographs above with AI (Veo 3.1).