De-extinction update — dire wolves and woolly mice

Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live Saturday Night Live showed some genetically modified woolly mice, to which I responded "I'm glad to see progress being made on mammoth de-extinction — science!" The company behind the woolly mice revealed an even bigger development this week, which TIME profiled in No Longer Extinct? Colossal Biosciences' Dire Wolf Project.

Colossal Biosciences' project to revive the once-extinct dire wolf could also prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves.

On the one hand, this is a great technological and scientific advancement. On the other, these aren't really dire wolves. They're genetically modified gray wolves with about a dozen dire wolf genes, which is still quite an accomplishment. If nothing else, they're proof of concept and cool animals in their own right.

Speaking of proof of concept, TIME reported Scientists Genetically Engineer Mice with Woolly Mammoth Like Hair last month.

Extinction is typically for good. Once a species winks out, it survives only in memory and the fossil record. When it comes to the woolly mammoth, however, that rule has now been bent. It’s been 4,000 years since the eight-ton, 12-foot, elephant-like beast walked the Earth, but part of its DNA now operates inside several litters of four-inch, half-ounce mice created by scientists at the Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences.

Cute, but the scientist interviewed at the end was not that impressed. Neither was Anton Petrov, who I first featured in Ig Nobel Prizes for April Fools Day 2025, a holiday special, in Let's Talk About the Woolly Mammoth Mice That Were Just Created.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the woolly mice (please note a small correction in the video comments about the base pair/gene differences between mammoths and elephants)[.]
...
Small correction (thanks Jake): It's not 1.5 million gene differences, but 1.5 million base pairs (building blocks of DNA)[.]
Mouse genome is believed to contain around 80,000 genes (but only 22000 create proteins) and here 8 were affected[.]

A more realistic comparison would be to use total number of base pairs and for Asian elephants there are 3.38 billion base pairs and it looks like 1.5 million are different between elephants and mammoths[.]

Still a lot[.]

Petrov's objection I most agree with is the ethical and legal one — obtaining an elephant to experiment on. Just the same, I'm more optimistic than he is, even if these are stunts.

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for a retrospective on Wayback Wednesday tomorrow.