The Dire Wolf Is Back
newyorker.com
The Dire Wolf Is Back
1–10 of 208 posts
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#2Very cool, but is it ethical?
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#3Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#4Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does it? Biological categories like species are fuzzy anyway. There is tremendous variation within each species. But where do you draw a line?
It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like one? Do we have any way of knowing?
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#5Very cool, but is it ethical?
We cause lots of things to go extinct. Doesn't seem any worse.
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#6Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#7Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.
Meanings shift with time. The original meant that (doled out as a very harsh collective punishment by the Romans: groups of 10 would draw straws and be forced to kill the one who draw the short straw). Now it's meanining is more along the lines of 'severely reduced', where how much is 'severely' depends on the context.
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#8Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
Haven’t read full article either. But dogs have an incredibly well studied genome and are generally incredibly well understood. And due to cloning efforts, performing implantation of lab grown embryos is established protocol. Wolves are also well studied and understood, so even tho dire wolves aren’t super closely related, the dog baseline is a great control.
This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we don’t know well.
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#9We're overdue for a horse archer empire as well
Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back
#10Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
I would guess that it has to do with much more available genetic information on dogs and more existing CRISPR work with them. However, I do not know if these wolves will give us a lot of information.
That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).