Jesus. Look at the cover of Time magazine.
They’re not even close. Look! They’ve resurrected unicorns!
It’s ridiculous. They made a few genetic tweaks to a grey wolf, almost entirely cosmetic, to make puppies that kind of look like how they imagine a dire wolf would look like, and now the hype industry has gone insane. And now the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, is using this as an excuse to not worry about protecting species, because we can just call up Colossal to resurrect them.
Many scientists expressed skepticism that the pups could be classified as part of a canine species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the achievement demonstrates that it is not government regulations but innovation that will save species.
“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” Burgum wrote in a post on X. “Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions.”
He has already met with the company about using its animals in federal conservation efforts, as well as for potential species restoration.
“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” he told Interior Department employees during a live-streamed town hall Wednesday. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.”
No one has ever celebrated additions to the endangered list, you ignorant buffoon. Colossal has never brought an extinct species back from the dead. And even if they could, if you’ve strip-mined the land and cut down the forests and polluted the streams, you’re not going to restore a species with a few artificially cultivated individuals. It makes me sick that this man who is supposed to be in charge of conserving our natural resources now imagines that he has carte blanche to take a chainsaw to every small animal because Colossal will bring them back.
Burgum posted these claims on Twitter, where he could expect to get agreeable comments from the usual fawning twits. For example:
@PhilStegem34522 Apr 7
Please look into the plight of PNW salmon and steelhead runs. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is a big part of the problem!!!
You clown. Do you think if we overfish salmon into extinction, followed by the death of orcas and sea lions, that we can then “fix” the problem by having Colossal restore them fish by fish, and mammal by mammal?
@MrsKinder Apr 8
Can we start protecting species by getting rid of wind farms?
No, MrsKinder, you’re an outrageously stupid cultist, and wind farms aren’t causing extinctions. Stop trusting the crap pouring out of Trump’s mouth.
Elon Musk has requested the ‘de-extinction’ company Colossal Biosciences to resurrect another animal after a successful dire wolf cloning feat.
Billionaire Elon Musk may be on the outs with President Donald Trump now but he’s still very much active on social media. With dire wolves seemingly back from dead now that the “de-extinction company” Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered three wolves that resemble the extinct real-life predators, the Tesla boss has shared his new pet wish
…
In a follow-up post, Elon Musk finally put forth his wish. He requested Colossal to “Please make a miniature pet wooly mammoth.” Notably, Ben Lamm and George Church’s Texas-based biotech company’s founding agenda was to bring back the woolly mammoth and “rapidly advance the field of species de-extinction.” Although the woolly mammoth’s cloned resurrection has yet to make it to the de-extinction success map, the company revealed last month that they’d made significant progress on that front, having bred woolly mice.
Holy fuck. No, making an existing mouse genetic variant does not mean that you’ve made significant progress
. You have not. I thought that was a stupid exaggeration, but now they’ve topped it with a species de-extinction
claim.
But if you want to see genuine idiocy, look at Musk’s request for a miniature pet wooly mammoth
. If it’s miniature and a pet, it is not a wooly mammoth. It is a toy for rich people.
Who does he think he is, that creepy JF Sebastian dude from Bladerunner?
Yeah, Musk probably thought that guy was awesome.
Yeah, Musk is Bladder Unner
Time for a new science editor.
They aren’t preserving species. They’re creating exotic pets for rich assholes.
Actually, it doesn’t even resemble the GoT dire wolves, because in GoT only one dire wolf was white, and it was because it was an albino (it had red eyes). It was Ghost, which belonged to John Snow. Al the others had more typical wolf coloration. Clearly Colossal paid good money to get this spread through the media. Even the New Yorker ran an issue pushing this completely acritically.
You mentioned one quote from Jurassic Park, but my favourite one, which fits this situation so closely as to be prophetic, is the Remembering Petticoat Lane scene. Hammond tells Ellie about his first attraction, a mechanized “flea” circus that was so good that people claimed to see the fleas, to explain that with Jurassic park he wanted to provide an attraction that was real. But Ellie replies: “It’s still a flea circus. It’s all an illusion”.
That’s what this dire wolf issue is, a sophisticated illusion that people are buying into because of wishful thinking.
J F Sebastian was a tragic character. He wasn’t stupid, and he knew what was coming. He symbolized, as you imply, the techbro who does things thoughtlessy – because he can.
The stupid, it burns.
Is this another case of history repearing? Last century the Hecks tried to bring back the aurochs by selective breeding, of course only creating something that looked a bit like one – but managed to impress Herrman Göring.
This guys go for direwolfs and mammoths and get applause from Elon Musk.
O.K., PZ, I know you care about your students so, enlist them to help you finish creating your massive army of mutant, monster trained attack spiders and loose them upon the rtwingnut xtian terrorist mump cult! Start with having them kill and eat all the ‘mock dire wolves!
Lots of outlets competing for the “Jackasses of Journalism” award these days. We’re back to the 1800s, where media outlets were merely mouthpieces for oligarchs. Nothing like journalistic ethics or fact checking existed. They published whatever would sell.
Rebecca Watson point out in her coverage that DNA data shows that Dire Wolves are more widely separated lineage from modern wolves than previously thought.
Watson also mentions some claim by these clowns that they want to recreate a Dire Wolf habitat for their fake dire wolves. If this had been published in “Newsweek” they could have relied on the global cooling issue from the 1970’s as a reference.
I keep imaging mammoths dying from heat stroke. They went extinct because the habitat they evolved in disappeared. The world’s a lot warmer than it was 10,000 years ago.
In the novel Jurassic Park, John Hammond’s company InGen created a miniature wooly mammoth to wow potential investors. Musk doesn’t have a creative or original bone in his body.
Correction: It was a miniature elephant in the novel. Still convinced Musk lifted the idea from the novel though.
There’s a running joke in the comic Girl Genius where some mad scientist makes mimmoths (miniature mammoths), which get out and become a major pest everywhere. I expect this was intended as a silly pun and an excuse to draw little mammoths as hidden details in the comics, not some prescient social commentary
I am sure that the venture capital investors and founders are very pleased with all the positive hype this story is delivering.
They may soon be able to get out before the truth comes out and ultimate value is revealed. Musk’s enthusiasm is all you need to know that it is fairy dust.
saw this elsewhere
no image embeds allowed, i guess just a link then…
Woolly mammoths lasted until about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island. The world is scarcely if at all warmer now than it was then. It’s not known what finally killed them off there, but it wasn’t the heat – or people, who may well have been responsible for their extinction everywhere else.
One thing that is extinct sadly is proper scientific journalism. The old media outlets always come with the argument that we should pay for them because only they offer quality news, vetted by trained journalists, in contrast to the deluge of fake “news” we can get for free from the internet. TIME is not making a good case here for that (and neither do most other new outlets).
I’m hoping that the popular culture inspiration that is driving de-extinctionists and other fantasists will next lead Colossal to recreate Shelob. Lock down the facility, folks, she’ll be hungry.
I wonder why they picked Dire Wolves to “de-extinct”. Why not something that went extinct in recent memory and would presumably have a lot of sources of DNA available. I live in South Carolina and would love to see flocks of yellow and green parakeets in my yard. Perhaps it is because Dire Wolves went extinct long before the historical record and so have no documentation about their actual appearance, behavior, diet, mating habits, and so on. And so they can say “This is a Dire Wolf; prove me wrong.”
All they did was create wolves to have white fur. People breed rabbits to be white, too, are these Dire rabbits?
@19 KG: If the world is scarcely warmer, than why are so many of the existing Arctic animals threatened right now?
These are designer gray wolves. Full stop.
Now what they truly lack is more butts. We need Dr. Alphonse Mephesto to step in and remedy that. We need multibutted gray wolves.
Just saw this take on Vox:
These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals (Don’t buy the hype about “de-extinction.”)
The author also launches into the ethics of the situation: why are we creating incredibly social animals with no other family?
jenorafeuer, that’s a rather spurious ethical claim because it’s incoherent.
(If they’re only wolves, then wolves would be family, and the converse)
It’s not spurious because they’re odd mutant wolves who probably wouldn’t even be accepted by grey wolves. But beyond that, they’ll never be allowed to leave captivity and the three sad mutant wolves will likely never meet a real wolf at all. You’re pathetically naive as always.
DrVanNostrand, the captivity aspect is problematic if they are kept isolated, but that does not entail the impossibility of socialisation with the same species.
And hey, maybe I am over-complicating things, and the actual concept was ‘familial’ rather than ‘social’.
I doubt that, but I can’t be stuffed to read the reasoning at hand.
(https://www.vox.com/authors/marina-bolotnikova suffices for me)
@ ^
Quite. Thanks for your usual invaluable contribution.
Direwolfadoodles are next.
Here how the news, our top story tonight: dire-wolves are still extinct!
Plan to save the iconic ice cream nougat wafer from extinction