‘De-extinction’: how we’re bringing animals back to life

Extinction is a topic no one wants to acknowledge, but it’s something that keeps happening year after year. Sadly, humans are the main cause of it: hunting and bringing new animals to the places they discovered.

Take the dodo for example, a small turkey-sized omnivore bird that lived on the island of Mauritius. It had no natural predators on the island, then humans came to the island, and they hunted the birds. The animals they brought killed the dodo birds one by one until there were none left. By 1662 the last bird was seen, and they were declared extinct.

Humans have carved their path through the environment, letting thousands of species go extinct. Although there was some hope as some species have been saved from extinction and are being found again, that won’t make up for the damage caused.

But this article wasn’t written to guilt trip people. De-extinction sounds like something straight out of Jurassic Park, right? Well, it’s been made possible by an American company called Colossal Biosciences. They have proved their abilities by creating the woolly mouse, a small species of mice with woolly mammoth genes.

This was made possible by something called gene editing, where they extract the DNA from the extinct animals’ remains and use the genetic structure as a base from the closest living relative of the animal. Using the base, they edit the genes to be as similar as possible.

Colossal’s most recent work and most impressive is the de-extincted dire wolf. This was made possible by pulling together most of the dire wolves’ genomes, the complete set of genes that make up an organism from ancient DNA, but you can’t clone an animal without living tissue.

So Colossal found the closest living relative in the gray wolf. The gray wolf shares 99.5 percent of its DNA with the dire wolf. They made 20 targeted changes to 15 different wolf genes, based on analysis of DNA extracted from dire wolf bones. Thanks to a surrogate dog mother Colossal says they have successfully de-extincted the dire wolf.

In the past 6 months, 3 pups have been born. As of April 2025, Colossal have announced the pups Remus, Romulus and Khaleesi to the public. They now live in a special sanctuary with 24/7 top veterinary care. Due to the base genes of the gray wolf and the original size of the dire wolf, the pups will grow to be 25 percent larger and have the biggest bite force of any canine. Releasing dire wolves back into the wild can help the environment by keeping prey populations under control.

But not everyone agrees with the pups. Geneticists are saying that they are not a true dire wolf but simply just an edited gray wolf with dire wolf DNA. Despite the debate it was an amazing achievement for the company and while they won’t be trying dinosaurs any time soon, they will be trying to bring back more creatures. What could this mean for the Tassie tiger, the dodo bird, and other possibilities waiting to happen?

Sophie H, Year 8