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A team of scientists working for the biotechnology company Colossal Bioscience claimed on April 7 that they had brought back the dire wolf, which went extinct some 10,000 or more years ago.
Dire wolves walked the Earth up until at least the last ice age, when a mass extinction event wiped huge numbers of the world’s species into the darkness, according to Live Science. Now, the biotech company claims they’ve grown “healthy dire wolf puppies,” resurrecting the creatures using DNA from two prehistoric fossils.
Researchers pieced together DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth from the Sheridan Pit in Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, piecing together a partial-genome. These results were then compared with modern wolf genomes, after which the scientists selected to use a gray wolf to fill in the blanks.
Hybrid Beast
The creature is not an exact dire wolf. It is a hybrid between a gray wolf with some features from a dire wolf, experts told the outlet. “New information shows that the original dire wolf itself was not really a wolf,” a University of Minnesota adjunct professor noted. Dire wolves split from regular wolves some 6 million years ago, making them “their own genus, so a very different species,” noted another professor from the University of Otago. (TAKE A POLL: Is America a Christian Country?)
Researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to make a total of 20 changes to 14 genes in a gray wolf egg cell that they believed gave dire wolves their “distinctive traits,” Live Science added. The egg was then implanted in a common domestic dog, a subspecies of the gray wolf.
As dire wolves lived in completely different ecosystem than exist today, the three puppies are being kept in a large natural enclosure. Researchers regularly keep in close contact and constantly monitor their health. And while they may not technically be de-extinct, they are definitely a new type of GMO wolf, one scientist stated
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