Dire wolves are officially "unextinct".

[Back In Shape]

They are 3 months old in photos

https://time.com/redesign/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.time.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F04%2FTIM250512-Wolf-Cover-FINAL.jpg&w=3840&q=75

[Back In Shape]

https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20250407444322/en/2431751/4/2501_DW_3Month_NonExclusive.jpg?download=1

[Neal Romer]

In the timbers of Fennario
The wolves are runnin' 'round

The winter was so hard and cold
Froze ten feet 'neath the ground

[diamenz]

that's just what we need to be doing is challenging mother nature with technology. we'll eventually *uck around and find out alright.

[Back In Shape]

Correction. The first photo is a Dire wolf at 5 months and the bottom 2 wolves are 3 months old.

Dire Wolves are only about 20-30lbs heavier than north western grey wolves but with bigger teeth and a bite force stronger than any canine in existence today

[Meticode]

These are not dire wolves. These are genetically modified wolves that went through human gene-editing as wolf pups.

Dire wolves evolved millions of years ago into what we know of them today. And went extinct through mother's natures own natural selection for probably either one of two reasons. One, dire wolves couldn't hybridize like like wolves came with other canid species. Or two the lack of big prey being available to hunt while other canid species grew larger in numbers hunting the same prey.

What's pictures in this thread may look like a dire wolf, but it isn't.

[Hey Yo]

Dire Straits >>>>> wolves

https://youtu.be/YIHMPc6ZCuI?si=kByZ0Cfz9n6LxuHw

[Chick Stern]

These are not dire wolves. These are genetically modified wolves that went through human gene-editing as wolf pups.

Dire wolves evolved millions of years ago into what we know of them today. And went extinct through mother's natures own natural selection for probably either one of two reasons. One, dire wolves couldn't hybridize like like wolves came with other canid species. Or two the lack of big prey being available to hunt while other canid species grew larger in numbers hunting the same prey.

What's pictures in this thread may look like a dire wolf, but it isn't.

They went extinct because their prey disappeared. Most likely as a result of a meteor or comet event. The northern lands have much fewer species than the southern continents

[Meticode]

They went extinct because their prey disappeared. Most likely as a result of a meteor or comet event. The northern lands have much fewer species than the southern continents
Pretty much what I said minus the comet part of it. It's just best guess at this point no one really knows. There's several theories why the prey disappeared and they couldn't hunt it anymore.

Things that we thought were facts 50 to 100 years ago or not facts anymore and we're proven wrong. Thinks we think are facts now will be proven wrong. Just best guess.

But in the end dire wolves are not unextinct. These wolves were gray wolves given dire wolf DNA through Gene manipulation to give them characteristics of dire wolves.

[hiphopanonymous]

I used to do paleontology art way back in the day and was always and still am fascinated by the recently extinct megafauna on every continent. Recent enough that humans overlapped for thousands of years with these animals, and all animals still alive today were once a part of the exact same ecosystem as those animals it was just a much richer and more diverse ecosystem. Like in my area, whitetail deer. You see them everywhere. Nothing eats them anymore so they're overpopulated and cars hit them all the time. They overbrowse and create a browse line in all wooded areas where plant life is basically void from 5 feet down.

Whitetail deer used to be just 1 of dozens of animals that shared the same spaces that were at that size or larger. And of course, all these animals were eaten by things like dire wolves.

Meticodes kinda right, what was created is more accurately just a modified gray wolf. I still am curious if the phenotype traits they claim they identified in the gene sequencing are a "near as makes little difference close enough" glimpse as to what a dire wolf may have looked like. I actually did paleontology illustrations of dire wolves in the past.

I always understood to make the lower limbs and body "slightly" (15-20%) more robust, which is easy enough to do. But I had to flat out guess what their fur looked like. And this may sound like a simple thing to get right but there were lines of studies that suggested they separated from the wolf lineage like 5 or 6 million years ago and thus could be as far from a wolf as say, we are from a chimpanzee. So do you just duplicate wolf fur? Probably not was my guess. Do you go by their closest living relatives (and what are those relatives?) I remember doing an illustration with one that had a stripe in its fur like a Jackal (a basil ancestor of wolf like canids) cause I just didn't know what was more plausible.

If their white fur is indeed an accurate observation of the genome, this is fascinating to me. Because white fur is usually reserved for incredibly specific environments in nature, and I would not have predicted white fur on a dire wolf based on what I understood it's habit to be. White fur would be like, arctic fox, polar bear, arctic (canis lupus) wolves, right? North of the arctic circle exclusively. Snow more than 8 months out of the year is basically a minimum requirement for an animal to benefit from being white. Dire wolves are the most common animal found in labrea tar pits and while they lived during the "ice age", LA was not snow for 8 months out of a year to my knowledge even during the ice age. It's possibly also true that they were many different colors though, depending on latitude and climate just like modern Canis lupus gray wolves - which like I said, are white in the arctic area but darker and more brown or gray basically everywhere else. The two specimens where DNA was obtained was I believe from Ohio 13,000 years ago, and North Dakota 71,000 years ago. Both places were perhaps "arctic" enough at those times that white fur I guess is plausible, but it surprised me.

2nd thing that surprised me was how big the nose is. NOBODY in paleo-art has ever gotten that nose correct if they indeed created the correct physical result in this experiment. The pups in the pictures nose is huge. Everybody in the paleo-art world renders their Dire wolf drawings with bigger bodies but the nose shape is always kept the same as a gray wolf. Those 6 month old pups have huge but also almost fox-like long noses. It does actually make sense to me, the nasal openings on their skulls are large. I just never put 2 and 2 together that it might also end up being a different, much more bulbous shape. Idk, it's just weird, I can't put my finger on it but their nose is just never illustrated like how those pictures of those genetic experimental wolves look but my gut says that actually seems accurate.

My final thought is, there is native american folklore of white wolves being "the great wolf". And I always wonder if native american stories stand enough test of time to basically be making references to actual recently extinct ice-age wildlife (that overlapped for perhaps as much as 8,000 years or more with original native american ancestors) . If the white coloring is again, actually accurate, this is the source of the mythic great wolf?

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Great_white_wolf

[Back In Shape]

I always understood to make the lower limbs and body "slightly" (15-20%) more robust, which is easy enough to do. But I had to flat out guess what their fur looked like. And this may sound like a simple thing to get right but there were lines of studies that suggested they separated from the wolf lineage like 5 or 6 million years ago and thus could be as far from a wolf as say, we are from a chimpanzee. So do you just duplicate wolf fur? Probably not was my guess. Do you go by their closest living relatives (and what are those relatives?) I remember doing an illustration with one that had a stripe in its fur like a Jackal (a basil ancestor of wolf like canids) cause I just didn't know what was more plausible.

I don't think these "studies" are accepted by most paleontologists though. Most wolf like species are thought to have separated around 800k-1.3m years ago. The gray wolf is actually thought to be MUCH older than the dire wolf(the dire wolf is only thought to have existed for 125/250k years)even though it exists today. If these two canids were truly 5 million years apart, I doubt they'd be able to use the gray wolf as a blueprint

[Meticode]

My final thought is, there is native american folklore of white wolves being "the great wolf". And I always wonder if native american stories stand enough test of time to basically be making references to actual recently extinct ice-age wildlife (that overlapped for perhaps as much as 8,000 years or more with original native american ancestors) . If the white coloring is again, actually accurate, this is the source of the mythic great wolf?

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Great_white_wolf

I bet yes.

[BurningHammer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm2CryDOM5M

[Meticode]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm2CryDOM5M

This video pretty much explains how I undertstood it. While I personally don't even considered a clone the original animal even if they made it a clone, this is further removed from a dire wolf than even a clone is because they start with gray wolf pups to begin with. It'd be like manipulating genes in a regular human being today to give them characteristics of a neanderthal and call it the neanderthal unextinct.

If anything if they completely cloned a dire wolf from dire wolf DNA it would dire wolf 2.0 to me. What they did with the gray wolf pups to me is more like a variation of a gray wolf.

[Jasper]

unbelievable...experts on here ...

[I] live in wolf country... never see a deer .. because of your love of stupid wolves.
1800's they eradicated them,so we could have deer and other animals.
Since the DNR brought them back because of the insurance companies and paper mills... every animal in wisconsin, mn, mi has decreased because of it.

[Meticode]

unbelievable...experts on here ...

[I] live in wolf country... never see a deer .. because of your love of stupid wolves.
1800's they eradicated them,so we could have deer and other animals.
Since the DNR brought them back because of the insurance companies and paper mills... every animal in wisconsin, mn, mi has decreased because of it.
There's plenty of deer here in Wisconsin. There's only about an estimated 1000 wolves here. Most upstate. We just get coyotes mostly in that lower half. Every once in a while we get a mountain lion. First mountain lion was officially killed documented just a few years ago and over several decades. Justified kill. Guy shot it with a bow from his bow stand about 15 to 20 yards away as it was hunting him.

[hiphopanonymous]

unbelievable...experts on here ...

[I] live in wolf country... never see a deer .. because of your love of stupid wolves.
1800's they eradicated them,so we could have deer and other animals.
Since the DNR brought them back because of the insurance companies and paper mills... every animal in Wisconsin, mn, mi has decreased because of it.
Don't know about your area specifically but I would measure to guess you might be missing out on deer because the ecosystem that involved wolves in the past was only in homeostasis when there were a lot more animals for them to eat vs what's available to them in present day Wisconson. Bison, Elk, beaver, woodland Carribou, Moose, and then finally hares and other smaller mammals, etc.

Yellowstone National Park-esq. Up to at least the 1700's everywhere in North America used to look a lot more like that with half a dozen large different prey types with different large scale migratory patterns coming and going, with a relatively sparse predatory population keeping the young, sick, and old in check.

There's probably a lot fewer of all types of big animals in Wisconsin now and thus you don't see the ones you'd like to see more of.

And when I mentioned Yellowstone-esq history, that's just the post-mass-extinction homeostasis. The real homeostasis of these animals was prior to the big die off and was like 10x the amount of large animal biodiversity. More so than the wildest parts of Africa today. 4 or 5 different types of Giant sloths ranging in size from buffalo to nearly elephant sized, several different types of elephant (woolly mammoth, mastodon, columbian mammoth, etc), and many more. Bison were way down the list on prey items for predators. The predators died with the big animals to though. The wolves we've got today came from Europe after the big die off and replaced the super predators that required all the big animals. Wolves basically don't touch anything bigger than a bison anyways.

Ohio in the area I live probably couldn't be more opposite of your issue with deer. Not that I'm advocating for wolves to be here but the amount of deer here is insane. Car strikes constantly and they tend to total a vehicle in the damage they cause. Forested or wooded areas have a "browse line" meaning no green stuff 6 feet and under in several areas that should otherwise be a lot greener with plants. There is a hunting season for deer in Ohio as well as park culling days in an effort to mitigate these issues. I'm just being devils advocate here to mention no predators leads to an explosion of ...plant predators. Then all the plant life thins out and outdoor areas look (and naturally function) like shit. Nature tends to balance itself out if left on it's own for a loooong time. Impossible to do these days with inevitable development. But just my thoughts on deer vs no deer.