This article was originally posted on Barrons by Charlotte Causit.
They whimper, drink from baby bottles and crawl oh so tentatively — they look like cute white puppies, not the fruit of a daring project to resuscitate an extinct species.
A Texas startup called Colossal Biosciences made a big splash this week by releasing footage of canines they say are dire wolves, a species that vanished more than 12,000 years ago.
“For the first time in human history, Colossal successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction,” the company states on its website.
Photos and video of these critters have flooded social media and shaken the scientific community, which has reacted with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism over this experiment reminiscent of “Jurassic Park” — the fictional story of a quirky rich man’s attempt to bring back the dinosaurs.
The company says it did it by tweaking the DNA of a modern-day gray wolf with carefully chosen genes from dire wolf fossils. This modified genetic material was then inserted in a grey wolf egg and implanted in a common dog as a surrogate mom.
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