News · MIT Technology Review
Colossal Biosciences confirmed it cloned red wolves
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If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn.
Key facts
- 14 individuals survived this gauntlet; today’s wolves descend from 12
- A startup called Colossal Biosciences claimed to have resuscitated the dire wolf, a large canid that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago
- In 2016, in a paper in Science Advances, vonHoldt and her coauthors wondered if there ever was a separate southern wolf species
- The team can collect DNA from the descendants of the 12 founders, but not from the countless wolves that had been killed
Summary
So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, the reporter drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Broussard peered into the darkness, looking for traps. A master’s student at McNeese State University, he was quiet and contemplative, his bearded face half-hidden under a black ball cap. Wolves and their relations—dogs, jackals, coyotes, and so on—are classed in the family Canidae, and the canid that dominated this landscape in eastern Texas was once the red wolf. Still, for decades afterward, people noted that strange wolflike creatures persisted along the Gulf Coast.