Colossal launches the dire wolf like a product — secret preserve, one howl

In April 2025, Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas startup best known for promising to bring back the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, announced its first visible result: three pups it called dire wolves, a species extinct for more than 12,000 years. Remus and Romulus, both about six months old and weighing around 80 pounds, and Khaleesi, two months old, lived on a 2,000-acre preserve at a location so secret that even journalists invited to see them were not told where it was.

The reveal was engineered as a media event rather than a press release. TechCrunch's reporter was flown to a second secret location to meet the animals face to face, because in an age of AI, Colossal argued, a photo could not be trusted. The science was shaped into a storybook arc: DNA recovered from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull guided 20 gene edits in gray wolf cells — the two species are 99.5% genetically identical — and the embryos were brought to term by a domestic dog. Colossal presented the announcement as 'The First Dire Wolf Howl in over 10,000 Years.'

The launch did what launches are supposed to do: it created argument. Scientists told TechCrunch the animals were an impressive feat of genome editing but not de-extinction — a gray wolf modified to resemble a dire wolf — while CEO Ben Lamm countered that the company was undervalued at its $10.2 billion post-money valuation. Skepticism, defence and the valuation debate all amplified the same story: a startup had put a creature back on Earth, and journalists had seen it with their own eyes.