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The Dire Wolf Is Back

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141–150 of 208 posts

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#141

Post by glacier5674 »

gambiting wrote: post #40
silexia wrote: post #36

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample and eat everything they find because there is no natural control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin out their numbers. >>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? Is a dire wolf any worse than regu…

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Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#143

Post by echelon »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #119

I think it's ethical, but I hate that it's fake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#DNA_evidence Look at this caldogram and text > The sequences indicate the dire wolf to be a highly divergent lineage which last shared a most recent common ancestor with the wolf-like canines 5.7 million years ago. The study also measured numerous dire wolf and gray wolf skeletal samples that showed their morphologies to be highly…

The first robots were toys and wishful thinking. But look at the path that's set us down.

Be it a pale shadow or not, this is a first milestone down a path I hope we continue on.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#144

Post by aerostable_slug »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #135
aerostable_slug wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact. I personally don't care if they "really" restore an extinct animal or not (perfect clone vs. hairy elephants). Their creations are cool proofs of concept for…

> The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact. In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.

The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe grasslands and promote carbon sequestration. It's difficult to sum up in a sentence but there are quite a number of articles out there on it, and it doesn't seem like the most bonkers idea I've ever heard.

And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & technology that they can spin off and sell for more mundane purposes.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#145

Post by glacier5674 »

altairprime wrote: post #80
MisterTea wrote: post #3

Paywalled 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?

Because Game of Thrones popularized the idea of a dire wolf as an exceedingly rare protector of children, which helps them persuade investors that there is a viable luxury market for this product. They named one “Khaleesi”, so it’s not a coincidental reference.

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Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#146

Post by glacier5674 »

api wrote: post #4

Containing 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?

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Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#147

Post by aerostable_slug »

tokonoma wrote: post #49
silexia wrote: post #36

Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun. Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.

A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These pol…

> need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits

A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers financial benefits.

One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might with an appeal to ecological reasons.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#148

Post by mmmrtl »

lightedman wrote: post #77
freedomben wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's a terrific article

Its a horrible article. Grey wolves and dire wolves arent even genetically related in a way that allows for this sort of gene editing and we have known this for a few years now. If anything, a dire wolf is closer to a red wolf.

It seems their deeper sequencing of dire wolf samples clarified the phylogeny - they claim the dire wolf's closest living relative is the gray wolf, at 99.5% identity. The 2021 study was only able to sequence the dire wolf genome at 0.23x coverage and put a 0.56 probability on their species tree (Fig 2A). https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/255832/1/NatureDireWol...

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#149

Post by silisili »

johnecheck wrote: post #34

Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editor…

> a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"

Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.

Re: The Dire Wolf Is Back

#150

Post by gweinberg »

naravara wrote: post #133
lolinder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked. That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan t…

I really don’t even see the point in “deextincting” animals that went extinct due to climate or geological changes. They’re not even fit for the present ecology anymore. De-extinction of species that died due to industrialization or human stress on the environment makes a lot more sense since there is, presumably, a vacant ecological niche they could be filling. Like bringing back the passenger pigeon or dodo bird, o…

I do. I couldn't care less about passenger pigeons though. To each his own.
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