The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 711: So Are Dire Wolves Back From The Dead Or Not?

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Matt James, Brody Henderson, Spencer Neuharth, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: The ascendancy of Dr. Steve, PhD.; are dire wolves back?; cracked robin eggs; our book Catch A Crayfish, Count the Stars is out now in paperback; alligators killing people; skull morphology; similarities between grey wolves and dire wolves; how similar a carrot is to a human; cloning DNA; Colossal's dire wolf care manual; how a household somewhere has the dire wolves' dog momma surrogate; the ghost portion; genetic rescue efforts; transgenics and taxonomy; spurring conversation about the biodiversity crisis; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Steve Ronella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the MeatEater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the

West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday May 6th on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com.

All right, everybody, hot damn. This first episode is Dr. Ronella. All right, everybody, hot damn. This first episode is Dr. Ronella. Oh, you stole the, okay, Phil, cue up the music. I was, you weren't supposed to introduce yourself that way. It was gonna be a surprise. My daughter teased my ears with that hat on. Did you know you can tell by the hat Yeah, like lesser people with the square hat they don't they're not they don't have that notice that

Octagon going you get a different You get a different taken photo Steve with his diploma. Hey, man. Yes jealous. Straight back. Is there a tier above that? Of other hats? No, I think that's the top hat. Okay, it's like Pope after that. I don't know that they make a better hat than that. Where'd you put that diploma? Well, that's just the, you know,

little inside baseball here. It's just a mock up. That's a prop. My actual diploma. My actual diploma is a big framed thing and you can imagine that it'll be right over your head Time of my life down there is the tassel go on a certain side. It's pinned. Oh, it's pinned in place. Okay Hmm It's pinned. Oh. It's pinned in place. Okay. Couple things, you guys think it's all like, you guys think it's all gravy having that happen to you. Well, I'll tell you something.

Something you might not realize. Woe is you. The hardships. So you go up, you go up, it's in the arena, you know? Like hundreds, like 650 students, all their parents. You march up and the seat they give you is right by the, right in the line of action. And it's televised, okay.

Totally new concept to you. So you stand up and you get what they call hooded, which you can't really see in that picture because it's all going on behind you. Your hood's all going on behind you. They gave you that, you give up and you give your speech. And I gave a speech called, there's no plan B. Then, you sit down and then they have to hand 650 diplomas.

But you're on the cameras aimed in such a way that you're there. and then they have to hand 650 diplomas. How long was that ceremony? The camera is aimed in such a way that you're there. Not doing anything. They warn you. Don't fiddle around. Don't pick your nose. Don't look at your phone. I fell asleep during my graduation.

There's a picture of me sleeping. I was wide awake. Because you had to sit there for all those people. How long did that take? A couple hours? Yeah. So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony. They split the schools. Which one were you? I was in the morning ceremony. Is that one more primetime? I don't think that anybody looks at it that way. They split the schools. So my honorary doctorate was from the School of Forestry and Conservation. So that school, all the foresters were coming up, which is

like a stressful time to be coming out of a forestry program right now, because that was like, you know, so many of those kids that come out of that forestry program going to land management agencies. It's stressful. It's crazy how you got a doctorate in an area outside of your area of expertise. Yeah. Well, like technically, like I think the forestry part, but the school of forestry and conservation covers a lot of areas that are of relevance.

In fact, I went and had, I went and did like a Q and A with the forestry students who have a lot of considerations around conservation, funding and other issues. Yeah. You've got some, so I don't think they mean that I'm like as good at Seth as telling what trees are what. Right. Do you know when Seth was in forestry school, there's a test where you have to identify a hundred and some trees by the bud. Not the leaf, a stick. Bet you Doug Dern could do that. Yeah, he's pretty good.

Today we're doing a podcast on something hardly anyone know about, except for people who listen to this show. This is old subject for people who listen to this show. This is an old subject for people who listen to this show. But other than that, everybody found out about them from Game of Thrones. Dire Wolves. This is our, Corinne estimates this to be our second and a half episode on this subject. Yeah, because we had a first one. We had a first one, which was episode 466, which was called Dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, which was with Dr. Angela Perry.

That was number one. And then our half one was touching on it with today's guest. With today's guest, Matt James from Colossal Biosciences. We touched on Dire Wolves, so there's 1.5. At the conclusion of today's episode the count will be up to 2.5 if you if you did learn about that there was such a thing once upon a time called a dire wolf from game of thrones which

was a misleading portrayal then you might have caught headlines such as... Everywhere. A headline everywhere on the planet you could possibly have a headline. Scientists say they have resurrected the direwolf, the return of the direwolf. The direwolf is back. Scientists revived the direwolf or something else.

Massive amounts of coverage everywhere about colossal biosciences Dire Wolf Project. So today we're gonna dig into all kinds of questions around that, including the big one. Why? Why would you do that? What exactly are they? And is it in fact, like how do you make it relevant

to conservation? But first the news. Here's my news item. We already covered my, my, uh, heightened level of everything. Just my ascendancy. Certainly a framing. Coming home from my ascendancy. We drive all the way home and I'm pulling into my, you know, like not my driveway, but our circle.

Yep. Where our house is off. And I see a crow, like we pull in and up ahead of me, I see a crow like regurgitate what I take to be a synthetic item. Baby blue, like a baby. And I'm like, and I already tell my kids like, what is that thing doing? And also he's he like deposits out of his mouth to Robin eggs that he carried at the same time. Just standing in the road, and he like spits two Robin eggs out.

He starts pecking at one, and pulls out a little Robin, an undeveloped Robin. By this point, my younger boy and my daughter are out of the truck heading toward the crow, which leaves its whole project in the road and flies off. My older boy is now heading to, he's like making plans to kill the crow in retaliation.

But my daughter gets there and she comes back to the truck and in her hand is a little writhing, featherless pink robin. Whoa. And in the other hand is an egg with a little crack. I know where this is going. I make my older boy dispatch the, I make him kill the one that isn't going to survive. What, would he use his boots or what?

His fingers. Okay. Then my daughter goes around everywhere trying to find a Robin Nest to put the egg in. And I'm telling her it won't work because it's cracked. And then she's getting upset and more upset and can't find a nest. I said, but I want to return to what I was telling you.

It'll never live. It's cracked. So now it's living in our, it's buried in our garden. Oh, I thought it was gonna be- I was like, it's nutrients will return to the- Oh, I thought this was like, you're gonna put it under like a pet pigeon. Raise up a-

No, she was, she was, she was, she's like, I know it's expensive, but we need to get an ink bay. I'm like, sweetheart know it's expensive, but we need to get an ink bay. I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked. Like there's nothing you're gonna do. You're gonna put some tape on it. So it's returning to the earth. In fact, it's gonna turn into. Raspberries.

No, it's actually where it's positioned. It will be an acorn squash. We've got a Robin Nest up under our porch right now and I'm just waiting. You know how those babies they can't they'll come out of the nest but they can't really fly real well? When that happens the dog's gonna eat them. We've sort of let this is just gonna happen. Well yeah I mean what am I gonna do move the whole nest? No it would be No. You know what was one of the more interesting things we've had on the show over the years is you know the myth that

if you like go near the egg and it'll abandon it? Touch him or something. Do you remember when we had you know the whole thing if you touch a fawn? Right, right. Remember we had Randall Kaufman and Matt, Keith or Monteith. He's like, well, that's true. None of our collaring projects would ever work out. Where we like net them, handle them, and then they stand up and go back with their mom, you know? But I was raised to believe. It's a good assumption to operate under.

That's what I was telling my daughter too. She says, well, she won't take care of it anyway. And I'm like, that's a myth, but they tell you that so you don't mess with stuff. But it's not true. It's just they're manipulating you into not, they're manipulating you into not messing with things you shouldn't mess with.

Two book thing news is one, for those of you awaiting it, our guide to wilderness skills and survival is out in Japanese. How many other languages? Don't know. I'm not sure of any other. I don't think any other. So they usually buy, when they buy it, it'll get, it'll go to like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America.

This is the only translation I'm aware of. But you being, you know, Asian, Japanese, adjacent. Little bit Chinese. You know. Here we go. Significantly Chinese. Perhaps you can help me with something. Yep, there are some kanji.

There's, yes, there are some script characters that are similar, but I long forgot how to in China do they read books backwards or forwards so traditionally it's compared to us backwards and it's not backwards right it's not backwards to them and it's from American perspective right to left if I'm not mistaken, right? I think that's what it is, traditionally. Okay, that's interesting. You already kind of answered my question traditionally,

because I have a Japanese fish cleaning book, which is my favorite book of all the books I've ever owned. It's like process descriptions on how to clean all kinds of fish. That's so cool. But if you read it the right way, the American way, the fish get put back together. Oh yeah.

So you're like, this is a book about resurrecting fish. But you're supposed to go back to what would be for us back to front. So when I picked this up, I expected it to be that they would have reversed it. But they, because it's more modern now. I don't think they print any books that way. So you might, if you lived in Japan, you might grab a book and you might encounter a book that is read from our perspective back to front, or you might pick up a book that's read front to back.

And it would just be like, whatever. You're adaptable either way. I think more, I think books that are printed these days are just done in the, I don't know, Western orientation. Yeah. Me and Dr. Randall were trying to find the translator online. We found her LinkedIn. Oh. I couldn't read it. It being in Japanese. Just in Japanese. I just wanted to get her impressions. I wanted to get her impressions I thought that was a bootleg copy when I saw it It's interesting how they put a dust jacket on a paperback. I thought that too

I also thought this version was prettier than that's a gorgeous cover Yeah, why didn't I think I think that's a very Japanese Americans aren't that Americans aren't that discreet? very Japanese sensibility. Americans aren't that discreet. As well, like the the Japanese have this wonderful art at packaging things up. So if you go there and you buy, I don't know, cookies, there's a problem because there's a ton of waste. But individual cookies have their own wrapping and then these wrapped individual cookies are in a wrapped box maybe with wrapping paper around it as you know presentation as a reflection of respect and of you know, and so it's not

Excited about all that he's like it's three times the pan International business. Yeah, I feel so three times. That's right. That's right I mean they have a huge like plastic waste problem in Japan But I'm not surprised that there is a cover on a soft bound book Another paper. Oh, you know I had a joke. I liked a lot And when I put that Japanese book on Instagram, and I said if this book would have come out in 1940 we'd still be fighting in the Pacific. That was pretty funny.

You get it? That was pretty funny. This catch, our kids book, Catch Crayfish Count Stars is out in paperback. Yep. So I was saying, if you had a kid that you don't like enough for a hardcover or who's not well behaved enough to deserve a hardcover.

Or if you have a kid that trashed the hardcover. Now there deserve a hardcover. Or if you have a kid that trash the hardcover. Now there's a softcover. Every kid in America should deserve a softcover. Too, maybe. But there's no kids that are that bad. Number one New York Times bestseller, this book, "'Catch Crayfish Count Stars' Fun Project Skills and Adventures for Outdoor Kids."

So if you want wanna raise outdoor competent children who understand, as Doug Dern puts it, life and death on the farm, or life and death on the asphalt with bird eggs, this is a phenomenal book to get your kid involved with. It's just projects, it's things they do and ways to engage with them with discussions about ecology and biology and everything outdoors. Yep, May 27th. The goal being if you see a mouse

and you say to your kid grab that it'll grab it. Mm-hmm and then ideally turn it loose. Well I mean just the fact that they'll yeah you know that's why I like my kids. Tell them to grab the, they're probably gonna grab it. It's from doing a lot of outdoor stuff. Spiders. We have an arachnophobia problem. But I've accepted that it's true. It's not just-

I think it's a psychological, like I think it's a legitimate psychological thing, the arachnophobia. God, this is harrowing in Florida. A 61 year old woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida. They went over, they passed over an 11-foot alligator. It's, it seems like it's spooked and does the noise of it spooking in shallow water, flip the canoe. And then decided to...

And then killed the woman. Tiger Creek near Lake Kissimmee, south of Orlando. How harrowing. Be a rough way to go. I think it'd be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly bear. Her husband. How heroin for her husband. Oh, way worse than getting killed by a grizzly bear. There's just not a lot of romance in it. No. Hopefully drown first I guess go Yeah, just The question is is are more people getting killed by alligators these days and days past well, here's the real question

You're right, but there's a way to arrive at that that I like I can't remember who introduced this idea. Oh I think it was a podcast guest. I remember we had Adam Pankratz on the show like reporting and what we well there, there's, there's, there's so like, so grizzly bears dust off, like that's, that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a person or two every year in Montana, right? So you'd look and be like, as grizzly bears have recovered and hit recovery objectives, and there's like more bears at higher populations, you'd be like, are bears more likely to kill a person? Be like, well, let's look at what an individual's bear, an individual bear's chance of having a violent encounter with a human. Or a run in with a human to begin with, and you look at human populations.

Yeah, but the thing, what I'm getting at is like, a bear today, a grizzly today, in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, a grizzly today, an individual bear is not, that bear is not more likely to maul a person. No. It's not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them. Yep. So if you went, point me if you went and looked at

Florida, like you know, alligators were in, had endangered species protections in the 70s. They sure were hanging out. Now they got like 1.5 million. Yeah, I mean they're living in golf course ponds and canals and people's backyards. So I don't, yeah, it's not like gators are like, like individual gators are like, man, I wouldn't have before but now I'm going to bite a person. It's just like, there's, you know,

so it might even be that an alligator, an individual alligator still has a 0.000 whatever alligator still has a point oh oh oh whatever percent chance of doing it in an individual alligators not like more likely to attack a person but you just have more opportunities but still be like what a couple people I don't know how many people get attacked every year in Florida couple die we've talked about a bunch that died but I mean what is it like five six people per year? Look that's easy. In March. Get bit in Florida. How many people get bit in Florida by an alligator? Divided by a million. I think

Spencer's checking up on that but in March the same area where this woman got was killed. Another woman was killed. Really? Yeah, in March. Did that one have something to do with a dog rescuing a dog or something? Oh yeah. Or something about a dog. Because yeah, 1800 grizzly bears in the lower 48, 1800 grizzly bears kill a couple people a year. So they're more dangerous per bear than gators if you have a thousand gators. But the other thing is you got tons of dinky gators that you can't really count. You'd have to start counting them at a certain size, I guess.

Since 1948, there have been 450 documented alligator bites in Florida. 30 of them were fatal. So it's a seven year span. I think we should finally get you on a gator hunt for an episode. Yeah, you know, I'd like to. I just never had, not that I don't want to,

there's a lot of stuff to do in this life. There's a lot of stuff to do in this life. The gator nuggets are really good. Yeah, I've had friends give me sacks of gator meat. I just have never like planned it. You know what I mean? This got us thinking about this. Did you know that there used to be an 11,000 pound alligator. And it's, you mean, used to be not like 10 years ago, like 10 million years ago. 70, 80 million years ago.

Like colossal probably doesn't want to work on this. Yeah. That one's a little too old for us. Oh, six to eight foot long teeth. Wait a minute. Six to eight inch long. What am I saying? That would be that. That's up. That's on my kid. That a minute. Six to eight inch long. What am I saying? That's how my older kid would report it. But do you maybe mean inches? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Six to eight inch teeth. There's a picture of one

eaten. There's like a like a fanciful painting of one artist rendering oh yeah it's like it's not an actual photo of one right not a polar one grabbing a t-rex which i love yeah do you know i mean but you can't rule out an 11 000 pounder uh they found the bones from one in north carolina in the 1850s how long i don't know mean, that's an alligator the size of an orca. Wow. I can imagine sitting there with your kid and they're nudging up to the edge of the pond. And the head would be the size of this table. Oh yeah. You'd be able to see him from so far away. That's the thing I think about with dinosaurs is like, what's that big ass dinosaur, the big plant eater.

Brachiosaurus. Brachiosaurus, yeah. If you were driving down the road, you'd be like, hey, look, five miles away, there's one. Do you know what I mean? It'd be so obvious. All right. Quick, how many other news items we got?

Just this. No, I had a news item. 35 feet in length. That gator. That's even bigger than an orca. This is an interesting deal because we had a wildlife, we had a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service agent on the show not long ago, talking about the smuggling of

wildlife parts. And this is reported that there has been a post-COVID decline in the smuggling of pangolin scales and elephant ivory related to a Chinese encyclopedia of medicine, having said, perhaps there is no health benefit to pangolin scales. I love it. And ivory. Well, how is the ivory tied to medicine? I don't know. I feel like the black market is always operated outside

of what traditional medicine would say is useful for curing or doing something. So I can't believe that like they're attributing this to an official journal saying, hey, Pangolins don't help your libido or whatever. In 2019, smugglers, crime syndicates were shipping vast quantities of the two products from Africa, um, into China. Says trafficking fell during the pandemic has remained low.

Law enforcement efforts have helped, falling prices have helped, and it goes on to say another possible factor is that in 2020, pangolin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine. We found out why ivory. Quote, ivory can purge the body of toxins and enhance the complexion. Sure. Now do you just like rub a piece of ivory on your face or do you grind it up? I think you grind it and eat it. You know obviously not backed by science but that's the uh. My wife was getting all her toxins out last week. She did a cleanse. And I was like, what toxins? Specifically.

No one's ever able to answer. The same way anybody answers it. They don't know. I was like, tell me what toxins are coming out of you. P-Fast, which we can't get out of us. Steve Rinella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the MeatEater podcast network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine

and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I

have. Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the MeatEater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. I had a social media hissy fit when, when, uh, the Trump administration canceled some federal spending on the lamprey problem in the Great Lakes, which I thought was a huge mistake

and perhaps quite expensive in the long run. In better news, they're following through now with trying to keep big head carp, silver carp, the Asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes. And in fact, what surprised me is they've now working with Michigan's governor, Jennifer Whitmer, the administration is fast tracking a barrier system to keep carp going through the Chicago canal

and into the Great Lakes. There's also been a big argument among ecologists and fisheries people is would those carp even like the Great Lakes anyways? I mean, the current thinking is they would like- The only way to figure that out is let them get in there, right? Like, what you don't, I mean,

that could be devastating to the Great Lakes. The current thinking is they would, because some people said that, well, they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is they would, because some people said they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is that they would like it and that it would be devastating. Well, the problem with Carp is they seem to like almost everybody, whatever they've ever been in.

They're like, wow, I like it, I like everything. All right. We're gonna do a little background on Dire Wolves here. You mentioned Game of Thrones twice earlier. Have you seen Game of Thrones? Never. I'm aware of it. Okay. Have you?

Yes, but I wanted your review on it. Never watched it. Okay. I don't watch serial dramas. You probably like it. I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like it. Didn't you watch Narcos?

Oh, wait. Oh, I do you Narcos? And then what's that? But that's a, that's a. There wasn't there a Danish serial drama with Miles Miggleson. Well, Pusher One, Pusher Two and Pusher Three. Yeah, but Steve's not into like fantasy stuff

other than Star Wars. I'm a little bit of a Star Wars guy, a little bit of a Star Wars guy. I don't watch serial dramas because I don't, with the exception of, what did you just name that I did watch? Was there like a Danish drama? Oh and Narcos. No no there's no day yeah okay drop Narcos yes that's it. Oh there's another one. Pusha one, Pusha two, and Pusha three. Sub-Tura or something an Italian an Italian series. I did watch that for a while. Subterrana or something? No, Gamora.

Well, because Gamora was a book, was a nonfiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came a film called Gamora, which was a devastating film about the Italian mafia. And then out of that, so so I watched because I was liking Gamora the book Gamora the movie I watched some of Gamora the series what I not that it matters what I don't like about serial dramas is after a while I want to get on with my life did you watch Breaking Bad can I ask you of course I've got the top five here see if you've seen any of what TV dramas of all time from the University of Pennsylvania no Sopranos no the wire no no mad men no Game of Thrones no okay I

trust you though I'm not hacking on it I just can't sure I need to move on like I can't give you know me movies I could have watched in that amount of time mmm and then I could start here's the other problem I have and I don't want to take up too much of our time here. I can start to smell the writers, keeping it going. The minute I get a whiff of them, keeping it going, getting an extra season or two of, yeah, brother, you know, you can just smell them, keeping it jump the shark. Yeah. Well, the good news about game of thrones is it wasn't that they were struggling to keep it going as they were struggling

to condense it into what they did. Oh. Because the books are just so prolific. The books kept it going for them. Oh yeah. Oh, interesting thing here, just about wolves in general. So the two dire wolves we're gonna discuss today are Romulus, were named Romulus and Remus, which are fitting for wolf names

because Romulus killed his brother. Was that part of your thinking? Well, we were hoping to avoid that part of the story. Nobody wolves are hip to fratricide. They are, yeah, exactly. It was fitting, plus the, you know, raised by a she-wolf. And there's a statue in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan of Romulus and Remus suckling from the mother's, the wolf's teats. Yep. Do we feel like rolling pictures for the video audience put a picture of on the little The two do you want to start with the adults? I mean they're now what Matt you said seven and a half Yeah, seven point five months old

And they're tipping the scales nearly a hundred pounds their little white fluffy Let me let me kick off a little bit. Despite characters, like Game of Thrones is supposed to be up north, right? It is a fictional... Yeah. It's like an up north show. Well, it's nice in Canada. It's a whole world, so there's like up north stuff and down south. The family associated with dire wolves, they're in the north. Yes. Despite, because in my thing I have here, I wrote

this like despite characteristics, otherwise dire wolves were southern animals. They ranged throughout the lower 48. They liked the south and the hot so much that 4,000 died in LA. Have I told my story 18 times about my first date with my wife? 28 times. Yeah, at least. There were dire wolves in Mexico. There were dire wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of a dire wolf showing up in extreme southern Canada. A way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps, Canada. A way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps, if you look where turkeys are, that's where dire wolves were. A teeny bit in Toronto, like a little teeny bit in Ontario. The National Park Service says they were found as far north as Alaska.

That's not true. I'm just telling you what the National Park Service says. We've debated that and we have even talked about it with our multiple people. But the one guy who debated it said that they weren't found at the La Brea Tar Pits. Who said that? Angela Perry? No. He was an older feller. It got mildly uncomfortable because I was like no I've seen've seen him there we talked about that with an old person yeah yeah we didn't and we did not I could probably find it so I thought about the guy that fishes muskies all time we can come back to this I think you're I think you're

talking about a dream sequence okay they're definitely in La Brea a Lot of them a lot of them. I have to tell my story about my first date of my life. I know I know Oh, do you mean they seem to have like water car? No, I'm not Jack I will find it. Yeah, we know they're there Horner No, Jack Horner. He was on the show. Big dinosaur guy. Spencer doesn't always talk about. They seem to have liked water. Florida and Texas have loved dire wolves. I don't believe we have good archaeological sites showing humans and dire wolves together. How do you feel about that statement, Matt? I think that's directionally accurate.

If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray wolf skull, and you take 15 measurements on it, this is a good little tidbit, four of those measurements are different. I'd like to know a black bear and a grizzly bear, how many measurements are different on I'd like to know a black bear and a grizzly bear, how many measurements are different on their skulls. So if you take like somehow, like you're doing like skull morphology,

they have four differences wider, wider and burlier than a gray wolf. Colossal says that 99.5% similarity between a gray wolf and a dire wolf, which always sounds like a lot until you think about some other things. They say we have 60% we humans have 60% genetic similarity with a carrot. So in this world, what I'm pointing out is in this world, little, do you know what I mean? Like in this world, little things get different.

I mean, like the differences of when you start talking about these like numbers, what you're arguing about is what comes after the last decimal point. And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome. Okay. So when you say 99.5%, you're still looking at 0.5% of 3 billion base pairs. Yeah, a lot. But I mean, like hearing it in the percentage thing gives you like a different idea. And the percentage thing can be, is one way to explain it. It's a hard way to conceptualize it because at the same time, you could say African elephant and Asian elephant are only 98% similar.

Oh, well, because I was just going to point out that according, and people debate these counts, African elephant and Asian elephant are only 98% similar. Oh. Well, because I was just going to point out that according, and then people debate these counts. Humans and chimpanzees, 98.8% similar. And I think an important part to remember when we talk about percentages of genome is what part of the genome is coding for very specific traits that end up expressing as differences between us and a chimpanzee. Size, strength, you know, musculature, hair, some pretty significant differences.

So that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't code for anything. It's just sort of, you know, it is what we call non-coding regions that we don't fully understand. That's the part that that's a part of this that puzzles me that I don't get. And that's probably why you can't look up how much genetic similarity do we have with carrots, which I was doing because it's like a lot of people are like, eh, that's not really a good way of looking at it. I've seen a few people that look like a carrot.

Well, it's a dude, you know. A former. His genetic similarity might be like 61%. Okay. Explain that 0.5%. Like it, like to you, Matt, Matt, explain if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf, and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire wolf are 99.5% similar, what is the 0.5?

And is it accurate to go and look and say, like I'll think about this with chimpanzees, just to set up the question a little more specifically, because everybody knows humans, because you're one, we're all one, and we know chimps, because we've been watching nature documentaries for a long time. So if humans and chimps are 98.8% similar,

is it fair to say 240 genes separate us from chimps, or is that a dumb way to look at it? I mean we're waiting in dangerous territory because I'm more a conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a geneticist at back home, right? I work with really smart people like Beth who really explain these things really well. But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to say 240 genes separate us from a chimpanzee. I think it would be an oversimplification to say 240 genes separate us from a chimpanzee. That said, I mean when we talk about the differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, what we're really looking for, what are the core phenotypes? What are those key areas of the genome in that 0.5% that we need to target in order to confer the difference,

the primary difference, which is like you said like you said, sort of a robustness of a size, a musculature, a hair difference, a coat difference that we've identified, and how can we then identify those within that 0.5% and pick the few most impactful changes? How do you decide, look at, let's look at color.

Why white? side, look at, let's look at color. Why white? So if you look at the genome of the dire wolf, and this is a really great question and one that kind of goes back to, you know, when you talk about having Dr. Perry on earlier, right? Dr. Perry was part of a paper that came out in 2021, along with Beth Shapiro, our chief scientist, who sequenced the genome

of the direwolf. And they only got what we would say is about 0.25% or 0.25x coverage. So sort of on average, they're able to sequence a quarter of the genome one time. So not a lot of data. We went back and we started and found two samples of direwolf specimens that we were able to sample and sequence their DNA.

One from a 72,000 year old skull and another from a 13,000 year old tooth. We ended up producing what we would call 13x coverage. So on average, we sequenced every base pair in that genome about 13 times. So that gives us a really robust data set as compared to the 2021 paper. What we identified when we have this new robust data set is that there, between these two specimens, that one was from Idaho, one from Ohio, one from 72,000 years old, and one that's 13,000 years old, both code for the same light coat color.

Not necessarily stark white like what we ended up getting, that's 13,000 years old, both code for the same light coat color. Not necessarily stark white, like what we ended up getting. Um, but they could have been, we don't know that. But did you guys tweak it to make it white? No. So it, cause it's like such a wild, I mean, you have to admit like the game of Thrones thing and people like the writer is involved with you guys. Like he makes them white. Yep. Well, he made one of them white. Like for the show. Yeah. There's five of them that are sort of characters in that show. Only one of them is white. The other have very typical morph.

All right. I'm sorry. Wolf. Okay. Coat colors. So but when it was born, you didn't know what color it would be. Or you would. Okay. Yeah, we already knew because we had made that change. So. So you had like purposefully made it white? Yes, yes. So when we identified that definitely over this 60,000 years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution between Ohio and Idaho both animals coded for a

very light colored coat as compared to what we would have seen in a Great Wolf. Like perhaps it was like coyote colored could have been yeah it could have been or could be even lighter like this white we saw we said mountain pale oh like if you look over your shoulder yeah I mean that could certainly be it or it could be white you know there there are reasons for that that white coat that could have persisted. But since we saw this common trait across space and time in these two specimens, we said, well, that's certainly interesting.

We only have two sequences, so that means 100% of what we sampled, you know, had this coat color. So we said, well, we should code for that. The trick there is that we also identified very close to that gene. And what we had seen, if you use the genetic background of a wolf, wolves that have that same mutation also often can have an issue with deafness or blindness. So we said, well, we don't want to use the exact variant from the dire wolf genome that we sequenced because it could confer a deafness or blindness issue.

Can you explain that more? I don't understand. I don't have the background to understand what you mean. The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when we've seen that trait in a gray wolf. Like did it naturally occur? It's naturally occurring. Oh, I see.

It would be closely associated with death. So like a white gray wolf would be more likely to have those issues. So we made a decision. We said, well- So that's not something that was found out. That's not something that people found out by trying to insert that into- No, that's just from people that have studied canid genetics across, you know, across multiple species. That's what I didn't understand. I was like, because I was like that would be a lot of experimentation to

realign. Exactly. I see. So our computational team is able to sort of run these simulations that tell us what they think the gene will code for, what it could also be associated with, what could be an off target effect if you made that edit and it had an unintended consequence. So we elected, you'll see in our press release or in our news we talked about we made 20 edits across 15 genes with 15 specific dire wolf variants. That means there are five variants that we edited for that were not actually dire wolf. What we did is we went and found analogous genes in closely related species. In the case of the white coat, it was from domestic dogs. We chose that specifically because we wanted to confer the coat

phenotype without risking welfare of the animal. So we made a decision to set the safest way in order to do this functional de-extinction project we were working on without risking the animals health or welfare was pluck it from a dog exactly So that's why you know people go is it a hundred percent dire with me you go number one this whole hundred percent thing We just talked about percentages of relatedness. It's kind of hard It's not a very clean way to explain it hundred percent kind of a bullshit argument But it's also why is that not a good way looking at it? Well, just the variation between two individuals like you and I have a significant variation. We're not a hundred percent identical. So if

Aliens came and abducted you and I Right, they would not then go and clone a human and make Corinne, right? They would say well all humans look like you and I well We know that we represent a very small portion of the genetic variability across the globe. Well, the one's got an honorary doctorate. That's coded in there, I'm sure, yeah. So, you probably have a legit one, right?

Not a doctorate, no. I stopped at the master's level and said, this isn't for me. So, we tried to avoid this hundred percent thing because that's really cloning right and we're not creating the identical individual we sequenced. Yeah because I think this is the thing that people don't understand and it's hard for me to understand is that there's an idea from watching like Jurassic Park or whatever,

that you're able to pluck some living thing out of a dire wolf bone and like add it into something. It's more like you're looking at, I try to think of it like I shouldn't do an analogy, but it's like, you're, you're looking at a, someone's got a paint sample and you're like, oh, I could make something that color. I don't know how they made that, that color, but I could make something that color, right?

Yep. And in the end I'd look and be like, wow, that is that kind of same color, but it might have different constituent parts. Exactly. Yeah. Is that a good analogy? I think that's a pretty good analogy. I might use it later too. That's good. I'm gonna refine it. Yeah. Let me refine it for a day or two.

A doctor should have a more refined. The way I think about it is when we sequence ancient DNA, which is what best specialty is, right? When we go in, what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a two billion piece puzzle from that specimen. The DNA has been fragmented over time and time and you know, things have been introduced like bacteria that chop up DNA into small pieces. All we get out is we're able to sequence all that and we get these two billion puzzle pieces and we have to figure out how to put them back together. But we don't have the reference on the cover of the puzzle, right?

So we have to use artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms in order to help tell us how to do that. We also have to align it to a close living relative. So then we go, well, we know a dire wolf was sort of like a gray wolf so we can start building towards a gray wolf. Then there are specific parts that we go, well, we know it wasn't totally gray wolf, so we have to start making educated decisions here, almost guesses as to what puzzle piece goes where. And so that's when you won't end up with 100% accurate representation of the animal you sequenced

because there was non-viable DNA in there, you can't clone it. And now we're trying to put something back together without a clear picture of what it should have been. Let me hit you with this one. Let's say you took one of your animals, Romulus or Remus, and you, heaven forbid, something were to happen to it. And you boiled its skull down and cleaned it up,

and threw it into a pile at La Brea Tar Pits, right? And then there's the person there sorting schools what do you think the likelihood is that they would grab that school and they would throw the dire wolf pile that's a good question I haven't thought about that way I would do it in a much less a fatalistic way I would we we can use a you know high-tech CT imaging and actually 3d print their skeleton which is one of the things we will be doing is as they mature as they kind of come into their full-size

We're using CT imaging in order to kind of get a clear picture of morphology from a skeletal Yeah, I was gonna add like Steve mentioned that we know like there's four skull measurements that are different like Did you build that into these? different. Like, did you build that into these? Yeah. The dire will ferrets we picked were specific to changes that we knew would be associated with those few morphological differences between the species. So you could, you were, you looked in at like, what is with the wide skull,

the strong skull or whatever you put it, you know, we're talking about dogs. I mean, go this is one of the, and reading all the coverage about your projects, why did the dogs get it why did the dog that birth why was it a caesarian section well so it's good question I so one of the things we did is while we were starting this project I mean my team we put together this hundred sixty page document that is the animal care manual of the direwolf right so we wrote an animal care and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with that That's 12,000 years extinct. Super fun project.

In there we had very specific protocols for how would we birth this animal? Well, one of the fears was is we don't know the fetal development rate and the size of a, of a newborn dire wolf. So we had one contingency was cesarean section. The other plan was natural birth. As we got closer, we were taking skull measurements via ultrasound and comparing that to the pelvic opening of our surrogate. Turns out would have been totally fine.

We could have passed those pups naturally. But that's the consideration. Yeah, however, day 62 was sort of our cutoff. We said if she doesn't give birth by day 62, their gestation's about 60 to 63 days. But using cloning technology, usually you're a day or two ahead, right? Because the embryo has developed in vitro

before you've transferred it. So say day 62 might be more like day 64, day 65. So we just had, just like most humans, sort of their doctor, if they're pregnant, will tell them, hey, if you don't give birth by this date, we will induce you. Well, we don't really do inductions with dogs. The safest way to remove all the variables

was just the cesarean section, and it's a very common procedure with dogs. And we had an amazing team of surgeons that were able to do it. And I think the results speak for themselves. We remove those variables we give health give birth to two healthy puppies a third on a second litter and Then and then all the moms, you know ended up great and now they're in their forever homes You know living life when you say a second litter like did you was there only two puppies in, like you weren't trying

to grow six of them? It was like, well, right. Embryology is a numbers game. If you've, you know, know anybody that's gone through IVF, you know, years ago, they used to put multiple embryos into, uh, into a mom, uh, same idea with us is when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know, 25 embryate, we're transferring 25 embryos, understanding that only two to six of those would take. In our case, we got two of them. We had another female that was pregnant with a second litter, and that's where Khaleesi,

our third, our female, Dire Wolf, was born in January. She actually had a second puppy that she was born with. That puppy unfortunately passed away on day 10 of anoreitis, so basically a perforated gut, and she got septically ill. We did a lot of looking and we were able to determine it wasn't related to any sort of effects of editing or cloning. It was sort of an unfortunate event of puppy development that we see, a know, a certain level of mortality. So that's how we got to three. We originally thought we were gonna have four. Will the dire wolves be fertile? Yes. Yeah, they would be very fertile.

We have specific strategies we can deploy in order to ensure that they would only breed when we intend to breed. Right now, our interest is not in breeding at the moment, but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive management of timing when the female is with the pack or outside of the pack. Can you give us some other examples of things that are in this manual for raising a dire wolf? And how do I get my hands on one?

If you're the manual or the dire wolf? The manual, the manual. Well both but I'm, I'd settle for a manual. The really cool thing is we publish the manuals on our website. So if you go to theclosel.com forward slash dire wolf you'll see there is a downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the part tuition issues.

So how do you take care of a, of a, of a whelping, um, litter of puppies to how do we manage them socially as they grow up? What is the diet that they should be eating as they grow? Uh, what are the expected milestones, developmental milestones? These are things we're sort of extrapolating from our work with gray wolves and other wild canids. Who nursed them? The dog didn't nurse them. So the dog did nurse them for the first few days. Oh, it did nurse them. And so Romulus and Remus, their surrogate was a very attentive mother.

And she got to be so attentive that she, if you've ever had puppies with a mom, sometimes they get to be a little nervous and they pick them up and they just poke them too much. It starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we just said, you know, similar to the precautionary approach we took with cesarean section, we said, we're going to pull them and we're going to hand rear them on bottles. So on day three, we ended up pulling them. Where's that dog now?

That'd be a valuable dog. It's a very valuable dog. And it was sort of a kind of a famous little, like a famous little donor dog. Yeah, we did this. We worked with the American Humane Society is sort of the oldest global welfare society in the in the world We worked through them to do a double blind adoption So they vetted a home for them whoever has it doesn't know they have no idea what they whoa They don't know correct. Yeah, nobody knows I don't know where they are and and the home doesn't know someday that dog

Is gonna do like a lot of people do What I start getting like I need to find out my real It's gonna look for its incredible Disney movie. It's trying to find its children. It'll be quite surprised when it finds them You're so big and white What kind of dog was this you You probably don't want to say it's give it up. Yeah, it was a mutt, right? It was a large hound that was mixed with a lot of other... Roughly how big? Somewhere between 40 and 70 pounds.

Okay. You know, I don't know if you're an American. Color. You recently got a dog. It's 40 to 70 pounds. I should have adopted the dog like in Australia or something where they would have no idea. Uh-huh. It's 40 to 70 pounds. I should have adopted the dog like in Australia or something where they would have no idea. They'll never put it together. I know, it'd be like a real, it's a little science project.

Huh, so that's what happened to it. What do you feed in those things now that they're six months old? So they started on a very typical milk replacer formula once we pulled them from mom and then we started introducing ground meats, like really slurried meats until they eventually started eating ground meats, mostly beef and horse meat. Raw meat.

Yeah, raw meat. And then we also had some dry kibble in there, essential nutrients, things like that for development. Now that they're almost eight months old, they've transitioned from that sort of ground meat to whole prey items. So they get a whole rabbit, a whole chicken, they'll get a quarter of a deer, things like that. So we're starting to get them away from the two square meals a day

to sort of a gorge and fast, more similar to a wild cadence of feeding. Are they in like a big outdoor enclosure? Yeah, so. I heard a rumor where it is. Oh, you did, yeah, that should be good. Wait, are you letting out rabbits? Tell him the rumor.

No, I'll tell him the rumor privately. Oh, okay. I'll tell him the rumor privately. In case it's accurate. Yeah, because it might be accurate. I just heard it and I was like, really? Oh, that would be good. I wanna hear that out there.

I'll tell you what I heard. I will tell you, they are tell you what I heard. I will tell you they are in the northern continental United States And they live on about 2,000 acres of a wildlife preserve. Oh Yeah, that fits. Yeah We might have to go, you know snuff somebody out if they're telling her secrets the real the real reason behind the secrecy is There did you guys see that that we came out with this news about a month before Dire Wolf that we made a wooly mouse? Yeah.

And we saw this, kind of a silly thing, but a lot of fun. The idea was this was like a phenotype validation study. We were taking traits we knew existed in wooly mammoths and that were targets for us to edit into wooly mammoth. But we wanted to say oh these Edits are having the intended effect So we didn't take the same wooly mammoth edit and edit that into a mouse that just wouldn't work we found the analogous genes in mice and

Conferred those changes and we made these Little wooly mice the idea that it showed that it they had the same effects on coat length coat color Adipose tissue, things like that. That would be important to make an Asian elephant a wooly mammoth. We came out that news and I thought, I can't believe we're going to go public with this thing and it broke the internet. People just started showing up at our front door of our office building, not where the mice are. Like want one.

They wanted one. They wanted to see one. they wanted to talk to the people that did that. So we quickly said, well, this was a month before launch of Dire Wolf. We knew we were about to launch Dire Wolf. We said, there's no way we could tell anybody even what state these animals are in because suddenly people will be showing up and 2000 acres is a lot to protect. So if they're on 2000 acres, there's no way you have a 2000 acre parcel that's free of Other animals. No. Yeah, it's it's so are they hunting whatever's on this 2,000 acres? I mean they're fed so regularly It's like a zoo animal, but they're interacting. They're interacting with wildlife. I've seen them chase deer off Like that, so they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it

things like that. So they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it. But they also don't have some adult wolf that's showing this is how we sort of stalk a prey and then we get on it and this is the kill move. They don't have that yet. We could, over time and over generations, do that similar to what they do with Mexican gray wolves and red wolves in terms of preparing them for introduction to the wild. And aren't you worried that like, they could pick up like canine distemper or some disease from a wild canine? So we were pretty meticulous in our site selection process and one of the things we wanted to ensure was that it was an area that,

you know, gray wolves had been extirpated from, so there wasn't a potential issue there. Obviously there's still coyotes in those areas. So we have to worry about that. We have coyote-proof fencing, but coyotes are pretty widely, they can get through some of that. So they're-

You got 2000 acres with no coyote on it. There's gonna be some people that wanna talk to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, they undergo a pretty typical vaccination regimen similar to what we would do with other animals. I'm looking at the CARE program milestone. There's a lot of things about social interaction in here. How does that work when you only have two of these things?

Well, we have three. So we have three, and there is an intention that we'll bring new litter on, because our goal was to get to six to eight, sort of a typical pack size. Obviously, we ended up at three, so we'll look at adding another litter to that, to that group. Hit me with it.

We're going to get into this earlier. Tell me the why. I mean, I get the why. Like I get the why from a showman, like that you would build a park, right? You'd be able to use them for movies and that'd be valuable. You'd build a theme park and that would be valuable. But what is the why? Or maybe that is the why.

What is the why? Yeah, you could do those things. That is not our why. That is not what we're doing. Our why is really built more around this selection process that we had about two years ago. We were looking at, you know, knowing that our big three projects, Woolly Mammoth, Tasmanian Tiger, Dodo, those are going to take us a while.

They said, well, we should start working on other projects that we could also help develop some of these de-extinction pipelines, get through this process a little quicker and be able to see and learn and help inform the other projects. In addition to that, in 2016, the IUCN came out with a proxy species rewilding guide or a creation guide. Basically this guideline document that an independent group of international experts wrote, something like 35 key points in this guideline, that talks about if you were to pursue the extinction or the creation of a proxy of an extinct species, which is easier just called the extinction, here is how you should do

it. And one of the most important things that it talks about there is, you know, there's a big welfare implication which sort of goes back to why we selected the specific edits we selected. There's also this process that these things should happen sort of in this contained, almost laboratory environment where we, if you're going to pursue this the first time you do it, you should find a species that you know a lot about.

You should do these things in a very controlled setting so you can study all the impacts from cradle to grave. Oh, just to be clear, the IUCN did this independent of you guys? In 2016, way before Colossal was the thing. Oh, that long? Yeah. So they were operating on an assumption

that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet. And that was when the Woolly Mammoth Dex thing, the stuff was really bubbling up, and so biotechnology was getting to a point where they said we should come up with some sort of guidance. Ahead of time. Yeah.

So it was really, it was great forethought. We used that as a bit of a guiding light in the way that we design this project because so We know a lot about canids and canid genetics, right? We know more about canids than almost any other species mostly because we all have You know a gray wolf in our house, right? I mean it is dog days, right? We all have dogs We all love our dogs. We study a lot about them and we know a lot about North American canids.

So that gave us a really strong foundation in order to be able to predict what were the effects of edits, what genes were responsible for what physical trait, things like that. At the same time there was this sort of, you know, opportunity for us to show the de-extinction pipeline is a real thing. I think when we talk about bringing back woolly mammoths, people sort of giggle and they go, that's never going to happen. So there was sort of this proof of principle need that we said, well, we could show how this would work. And finally, there was also the pop culture bit. You touched on dire wolf, right? This idea that we could bring science into the pop culture, blend those, bring more eyes and attention onto de-extinction, onto extinction, conservation, things like that.

So there was this perfect Venn diagram that sort of overlapped with Grey Wolf and Dire Wolf, that we could do all of those things while creating technologies that were responsible, or could help save other endangered canids, like the American Red Wolf, which, you know, lost in our bit of a media circus that occurred after Dire Wolf was this idea that we were also working on American Red Wolves.

And there's some cool stuff that we should talk about there. But so the why was sort of that perfect opportunity to blend in pop culture with a proof of principle of de-extinction and taking that first pass at de-extinction that this that first pass of de-extinction that this 2016 guideline sort of showed us how to do it. And that really outlined, you know, know a lot about the animal, put them in an area where you can study them closely.

And these would not be animals that would be a generation ready for release. We knew dire wolves were not going back into the wild. We made these as part of that pursuit of de-extinction. So you do it knowing they won't go into the wild. That's another question I was going to have is how much do like, how much, how worried are wildlife professionals, this is a question they hadn't had to grapple with before, how worried are wildlife professionals and conservationists that you would create a, that you would like create a creature that could potentially get out

and then reproduce with imperiled species in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species. Like that's gotta be a real concern. We're having a conversation right now where guys are like in the deer, in the servaned world, people are saying, oh we can make, we have some examples of deer that are very slow to develop CWD. They get CWD but they're slow to be affected by it. And they say what we'd like to do is cut these deer loose just to introduce some of this.

Besides it being, as it's been explained to me by many servant experts, is kind of like doesn't make sense when you understand the scale of the millions of deer out there and that you're gonna try to like influence gene flow by cutting animals loose. But they also point to all these moral issues

and other issues like, what if those things also carry a susceptibility to other diseases? What if that infers upon them a sort of hidden weakness? So if you have these creatures and they get out and they start breeding with wolves, I assume they could breed with wolves. Yeah.

How nervous are people that that'll happen? I mean, that's a question we get almost every day when people talk about it. So first, the first step to protect against that is the facility itself. You know, extremely secure double fence, actually triple fence, if you include our perimeter fence. You know, we just, we've had to have

really thorough conversations with government agencies to explain all the measures that have been taken to ensure it's a bio-secure facility. So there's that piece of it. The other side of it is, is really sort of like the CWD example is really good, is, you know, we, we need to know more about these animals before you would ever cut something loose whether it's a dire wolf or it's a woolly mammoth right we need to know a lot about these animals and what are the effects of gene editing what are the effects of cloning what are the effects of the specific edits we chose which is exactly why we chose dire wolf because we knew it'd stay in this area and we can do that cradle to grave sort of

research with them so this is a great opportunity for us to show what are those impacts. But you know the CWD example is really interesting because you are you know we get the question about playing God a lot and that is sort of one of those sort of God decisions we're making as we said these animals have this specific prion gene that makes them more resistant or you know more can compare the the prionic disease more than others but what are the what are the things that tag along with that or if all that's say all the white tail in Texas were suddenly wiped out by CWD and only the animals that were released

there that are remain you've created this sort of genetic bottleneck because my guess is you didn't make 10,000 of those, right? You only made 100 of them. So there are a lot of these ethical decisions we have to have. I love de-extinction. I love Colossus. I love the direwolf project because it puts that debate forward because we're going to have to start having these conversations more. Right? That's like, in my mind, that is the conversation.

And I credit, like, to get somewhere, like, you know, let's say you look at the people that are eager about the idea of colonizing Mars. Yeah. There's all kinds of questions, huge questions about the possibility of that, but at some point you just go like, well we'll start going that direction, we'll solve what we can solve, understanding that there could possibly be a wall that we don't see. Like you start before the pathway is clear, right? Just like, I don't know, we'll start walking that way and what happens, what happens, may we fall off the end of the earth at some point it was off or not

But we got to start mm-hmm asking questions answer questions. I feel that with anything to do with de-extinction like Because I don't understand the side. I'm not like trained enough smart enough to understand the science you are a doctor though. I am other a forestry I can't understand the science like You are a doctor though. I am. Other areas. A forestry. Other areas. I can't understand the science. Like I'm incapable of understanding science, but I can understand this. At some point, the de-extinction process will be that we have, like, we have a Tasmanian tiger or a thiocene or an approximate, we have an approximate ivory-billed woodpecker. We humbly ask your permission to let it go. And like I

can just imagine the resistance. Oh yeah. Maybe even a knee-jerk resistance. Maybe an unwarranted resistance. But that to me, not insurmountable, but that to me is the final argument. Because there's got to be a like, what's going to happen if we do? We want to see what's going to happen, right? But I think what's missed often in that sort of that very conservative approach to these things of, well, we need to answer every question before we take the next step is what is the opportunity cost of not acting yeah right if we could restore a dialysine to Tasmania could we start to reduce wildlife disease and and level out prey populations in a way that helps support biodiversity of Tasmania yeah I

think we could are there some other negative? There might be and we should understand those, but we also can't say we need to tick a hundred percent of the boxes before we take the next step because we will never get anywhere. Yeah, I think Teddy Roosevelt had that really famous quote, in the moment of any decision, the best thing to do is the right thing, the next best thing to do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing to do is nothing. Right? And so that's really our mentality is we need to push forward, we need to push technologies forward that give us an opportunity to solve for some issues. And could there be this butterfly effect that creates an unforeseen issue?

Absolutely. Should we be prepared as possible before we take those steps? Absolutely. I'm not debating that. But right now, there is an issue in the conservation community that we are accepting status quo because we're afraid of the unknown. And we haven't acknowledged that status quo means a reduction of biodiversity over the next 25 years of maybe up to 50% of the biodiversity that exists today.

We need to start taking steps and bringing tools to the conservation game that create fundamental change, that create magnitudes of change, because we are getting our asses kicked on the biodiversity front. So another why that I've heard is, like, why work with a species like a dire wolf that ultimately proved to be, like, unsuccessful? you know, it had its time and then was unable to cope with whatever changes led to its extinction. Why not work with like Siberian tigers that are like imperiled and you could grow those and they won't let them cut them loose. I'm just saying, I think it's also not an either or proposition.

That's not how you work. We are a more is more yes and type of group. So we love using de-extinction as this ability to bring new eyeballs, new funding to the table, bring attention and awareness and money to the conservation battles that we face on the endangered species front by using de-extinction as an engine to fuel that fight. So with the de-extinction of the direwolf, we have also been working on the genetic rescue of the American red wolf. Red wolf declared extinct in the wild in 1980.

In the 60s and 70s, US Fish and Wildlife realized that we had almost killed them all, so they went to Louisiana and Texas and they captured What they thought was the remaining group of red wolves using very specific Morphological measurements similar to this dire wolf gray wolf debate, right? Well within reality what they did is they caught 14 animals and they said this is now the founding population of a captive group That will then be kept in human care until we figure out how to get them back into the wild. Yeah, and what was the island they put them on? Oh yeah, I can't even, St. Elizabeth. Was it off South Carolina?

Yeah, it was off South Carolina. Now they're in northeastern North Carolina, which is the experimental release site. Well, the problem with that is they were looking for a very specific phenotype, and they didn't have the power of genetics in the 70s when they were trying to understand what was a red wolf and what was a coyote in Louisiana and Texas. So what they did is they caught 14 animals that fit a very specific bill. Wind the clock back about eight, nine years ago, Bridget Von Holt from Princeton University and Chris Imbresky from Michigan Tech, they rediscovered that there is actually this extremely high level of red wolf ancestry in that canid population in Louisiana and Texas.

And if you look at the genetics of those canids from the sort of hot spot and it radiates out, you can see that the proportion of red wolf within these Louisiana and Texas populations is about 70% red wolf, 30% coyote. As you radiate out, you sort of flip it. And by the time you get to like Dallas, where I live, it's totally inverse. It's barely any red wolf and totally coyote. So this is a very unique group of canids that have persisted since the 70s.

Meanwhile, the closed population that's used, the captive population that's used for reintroduction to North Carolina has had the same 14 founders, actually only 12 of those bred and are represented. So now you have about 250, 270 animals in captive population that stemmed from 12 individuals. Huge genetic bottleneck and totally missed some of the phenotypic diversity of the red wolf. Going back to when aliens abducted you and I, they would have missed all the people living in Asia and Africa and South America, and they would think everybody looks like us,

and that would be a horrible representation of what our species actually is. Similar to that, they missed a lot of genetic diversity that still exists there. So we've created, using the same technology used to make dire wolves. We now have this ability to be able to sequence all of these red wolves or these Gulf Coast canids is what we call them or ghost wolves because they have such high levels of genetic ancestry of the American red wolf. They also have a portion of their genome that's not assigned to any other canid. So it's likely that ghost portion is the ancestral Red Wolf, the pre-extinction Red Wolf that we don't have a reference

to yet. But we're creating this, we're doing historic sequencing to understand before the extinction what was Red Wolf and then that would assign how much Red Wolf are these Coyotes. Now that's an opportunity and this is one of the things we've been meeting with the US government and Secretary Bergamon is now we have this opportunity to create a genetic rescue tool that could be an opportunity to the US Fish and Wildlife Recovery Program to say your species is sort of headed for extinction because of its extreme genetic inbreeding. We have a fresh set of genetics that we could

plug into your population and help sort of revitalize. Similar to when Texas cougars went into the Florida panther population, we could do that type of genetic rescue effort. Which was controversial at the time. And now people hail it as one of the biggest successes in North American conservation. But it was like, well you're corrupting

the Florida gene pool. It's not the same thing. Those Florida Panthers will now be not quite Florida Panthers. They won't be cross-eyed and kink-tailed. And people are like, well, they're closer than none, would be the argument. That's our focus, is function within an ecosystem. Can we create a dire wolf that would have performed the same function in its ecosystem or can we help rescue a species and it still perform the same function? The answer is yes, we absolutely can and we need to be more

focused on the pragmatic idea of what function does a species provide to its ecosystem versus genetic purity in this weird eugenics mentality we have about species. So that's why we sort of, I think, raise eyebrows is because we are more focused on that side than this idea of what is 100% gray wolf, what is 100% dire wolf. I think there's some of the blowback is like, you have an animal and that animal is that animal

out in the wild and it becomes like less wild when you start tinkering with its genes and laying the hand of man on it and you know what I mean? But in that case the hand of man I mean they were in a pen off of they were in an enclosure on an island right to build up a reproducible number. I understand yeah I'm just saying it is very different. Well, yeah, and the hand in the man is why they're going extinct, right? We were poaching them out of existence.

But let me hit you with a Red Wolf criticism. And in some ways, I think this criticism was a little bit unfair, because it's not like you're taking federal money that would normally go to Red Wolf recovery and using it for something else. Exactly. So it's like, it's pure, the work is additive,

but there's the criticism that would say this, like guys that work on the Red Wolf problem, are like, our problem is that people shoot them, and they get hit by cars. Yes. So we're not looking for new animals. We're looking for, how do we create an atmosphere

in a place where they don't get shot and hit by cars? So it's like, that's beside the point. It is not a silver bullet to the red wolf problem. It provides a genetic rescue and buys them more time. Their captive population will begin to suffer as it's a closed population, right? So this gives us an opportunity to inject fresh genetics. Also that North Carolina site, you know, whatever you take it back eight years ago or so the US Fish and Wildlife announced,

hey, we're gonna start finding a second site, a parallel effort because obviously, you know, if you're familiar with the red wolf issue, red wolf population in that area got north of 150 individuals in around 2013, basically. People started shooting them, they started getting hit by cars. Today, their primary issue is car strikes. What's interesting is it's a different area in Louisiana and Texas. You have larger landscapes, but you don't have as many public lands that protect the animals there.

And those animals have persisted since we thought they would have gone extinct. I think there is this weird issue that people sort of say, well, if we acknowledge that these animals are predominantly red wolf or maybe even truly red wolf, as we understand more about their genetics, that's also acknowledging the fact that we didn't need to intervene in 1970s. They would have continued to persist in that area. Yeah, because where they do, where they did bring them, they've tried to keep coyotes. Yeah.

Right? Like that understanding of that species with coyotes, and then here you have that other source population that probably has a bleeding edge where coyotes roll in. People talk about admixture. People will say, call it hybridization. Hybridization is the wrong word, but admixture is sort of this idea that two species have this blending of genetics. They look at that as a bad thing, as diluting the gene stock of a species.

But hybridization and admixture of species is a natural process. It's actually an evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advantages to animals, gives them the opportunity to thrive within an evolving habitat. They can look at a species and say, oh, that coyote actually is much faster or stronger, whatever it is, and they breed with that and that brings that into their gene pool. That's an adaptive strategy. That's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system of know that we... What's wolf? Canis lupus? Yeah, Canis lupus? Yeah, Canis lupus.

We're homo sapien, the rainbow trout is onchrynthus micus. Micus, yeah. Whatever the hell. You go in and you say like, I'm gonna take all creatures on earth, and I'm gonna say that they're all whatever, causes you to lose sight of the long time, and the long time is that there's fluidity. Yes. Things, right? It's similar to... things come together and fall

apart and it's not static, it's a snapshot. When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem. We say recovered to what, right? Are we recovering, you know, in North American centric conservation, we say recovered to 1492, right? Recovered it before Europeans came in and ruined the place. Yeah. That's always my view. Yeah. But, you know, there was a, there ebbs and flows before that, and there would have been ebbs and flows after that. At what point, why do we pick an arbitrary point in time?

Why do we pick an arbitrary definition of a species in time to say that's the species? It's a, it's, I think it makes sense from a communication standpoint, we need to be able to talk about these things, classify things, have goals, that's very important. But to use that as this ideology that we cannot stray from, I think is naive. When I had many conversations with friends of mine in the wildlife world when Colossal made its announcement about the dire wolves, one of the conversations, I can't remember who the hell I was talking to, was saying to me, you know where this would be really helpful? Black-footed ferrets. Absolutely.

Black-footed ferrets went through a 10-ferret bottleneck? Mm-hmm. Okay, but I want to return,, I wanna do the regulatory thing about ivory-billed woodpeckers and black-footed ferrets. Who, like who, what, would ever have to say okay to be that like our population, our global population of black-footed ferrets was reduced down to 10 animals,

but we have all these specimens that show a level of genetic diversity that did not exist in those 10. The black-footed ferrets aren't getting shot, they're not getting run over, right? They're fairly easy to protect. Who has to say yes to start inferring lost genetic diversity into black blackfooted ferrets? Like

who would be the who is the one that goes okay? It's it's it's hard so blackfooted ferrets a great example because they've been using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue blackfooted ferret because people were banking tissues of blackfooted ferrets back into the 70 the 70s. So if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone that they brought back. She was an unrepresented founder. They cloned her. Unfortunately, that single individual,

she didn't actually, she wasn't able to reproduce, but they cloned her again. And now they've had the first ever clone breed and give birth to offspring. Who's they? The US Fish and Wildlife Service Recovery Program. So that's where we would start? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Recovery Program. So that's where we would start. You start with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

because they are the ones that are mandated by the Endangered Species Act to recover species listed by the act. So they have the jurisdiction in that area. Now, if we were just using cloning like what they did, U.S. Fish and Wildlife has been able to do that on their own. Now, if we were to bring colossalal type technology, which is cloning plus genetic editing, and we said one of the primary drivers of the black footed ferret extinction crisis we're facing is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is

present in their obligatory prey species. The... Prairie dog, thanks. Yeah, that's a hard one to remember. So prairie dogs are carrying sylvatic plague and that when they predate on a animal that has plague, they also get plague and they die. We know for a fact that the closest living relative of the black-footed ferret, which is the domestic ferret, has a naturally occurring resistance to plague. Hmm. ferret has a naturally occurring resistance to plague. And it's a very small change. So you could go in and make a genetic edit within the black-footed ferret genome and suddenly ferrets are resistant to sylvatic plague. And now we can make a huge difference in the recovery of

black-footed ferrets. But now it's like, now we're going to have whatever. Yeah. Now we're dealing with multiple agencies, the USDA, the FDA, they all have, they all have some jurisdiction in what we call intentionally altered genomes. Okay. There are examples of us fish and wildlife service, like saying this is an acceptable level of genetic representation, Like in Colorado, they, like with cutthroat trout, they would find like an isolated like subspecies of cutthroat trout and be like, ah, it's like pretty much there. So we're going to put it back into this place. And so, I mean, someone's capable of saying like, it's close enough. Yep. And that's US Fish and Wildlife typically.

But once we start getting into gene editing, we start inviting more regulators to the table. And that's what we're doing right now. And we're actually pushing the boundaries of the regulatory environment because this, you know, these were all hypotheticals and now they're realities and people are scrambling to say, how the hell do we do this?

So could you run, could you, how long does a black footfooted ferret live? 10, 12 years. Okay. Could you run, would it make sense that you would run a generation? Right? Mm-hmm.

You'd make a plague resistant black-footed ferret. If you ran it for a gen, if you just let it go for a generation in captivity, would you then be able to be like, would you then be able to dispel, would that be enough time to dispel some of the questions? Yeah, I think that's a take like, would you have to run five generations? That's a good question. That puts you 60 years down the road. I mean, I certainly don't think Colossal has the answer for that specific question. I think that is a regulatory question.

You know, at what point do we feel comfortable with this? Now, knowing that they have a close living relative with this exact gene, how much do we need to do? Because we've studied domestic ferrets for hundreds of years, right? That might inform what's happening here. But I think you could set up an experimental population where you're able to do a lot of those things and within a generation or two,

begin to put animals back into the wild. Now the trick with black footed ferret is that, you know, we probably need to find some resistance for prairie dogs as well. All right, if they're gonna continue being the vector of the disease, you need to remove the vector. And they have to, you know, you have to have prairie dogs because prairie dogs They're blackwood ferrets rely on their their holes plus they eat them

So, you know ranching folk don't really love prairie dogs They create a lot of problems for cattle and so to go and convince people that we should do something protect prairie dogs It might be a harder sell. Like you feel that, that the constant exposure could in time, that the susceptibility could return. Potentially. I see. Yeah.

A month ago, Time Magazine reported that the Mandan and Arikara tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility colossal is studying. So two things, one, that seems to go against what you said earlier about the dire wolves living in the wild. And then two, what is that tribal communication been like with you guys about why they have a desire to have

dire wolves on their reservation? Yeah, I wouldn't say it goes against what I was saying earlier. I think it would be replicating what we've done already, but on tribal lands. So a 2000 acre enclosure. Yeah. So a year and a half ago, we launched Colossal's Indigenous Council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community from the indigenous world to the table to say, how can we enhance the conservation work you're already leading? How could we adopt, you know, things like coexistence strategies

that our Native American partners have been much better at than we have? And so part of that was, you know, one of the reasons for Dire Wolf when we were launching is we were working with Chairman Fox at MHA Nation in North Dakota and we were talking to him about some bison genetic work that we were doing because Beth has a big background in bison genetics. And Chairman Fox had started telling us an origin story of his people and it talks about the great wolf which was this large, extremely large wolf. It was a white wolf or a light colored wolf similar to what we're talking about and It was part of their origin stories passed down through oral tradition and their people Believe that that that they had co-existed with dire wolves and that's part of their origin story

So there was a big interest They said if you guys are able to do this we would love to bring the dire wolves back to our land so we can also honor This this ancestral wolf that's important to our people. Who has done, this is a global story, who's done a good or a bad job from your perspective of covering it? That's a that's a great question. I know the bad one, yeah there was one that was crazy. What's that one? It's like uh, I don't even want to say on there It was like a cult reporter. Oh, yeah We won't give them any clicks

That was wild that was that was just looney tune stuff. I think there's some been some bad stuff a good example is What is the Cowboy Statesman? there's a Wyoming publication, right? They wrote an article about, you know, this is what's going to happen when dire wolves are introduced to Yellowstone. Like, there's such a leap of logic, so many steps. There was no reason. They were cut right to the end.

Yeah, yeah, and it was just, you know, this is gonna be horrible for Yellowstone. You know, well. I like their stuff generally, but they are kind of bulldogs. I could see how they could take a story like this and do exactly what you're saying. Yeah, but it's skipping a lot of steps.

Yeah, another one that did a poor job that I was disappointed with, because it's a friend of ours that we know pretty well, was the Washington Post said, after Secretary Burgum had come out with a public statement of support for de-extinction technologies as a tool for conservation, was basically, the headline was this really superficial

stretch that said, oh, Secretary Bergam and the Trump administration will use de-extinction to gut the Endangered Species Act. And they've said that. Well, they didn't say that. I mean, his quote, which is pretty powerful and I was blown away that he took such a bold stance, basically said, this is technology that could be fundamentally game-changing to the recovery of species Which would lead to D listing this wasn't just gutting the endangering I read that and that was but that's a very common kind of environmental reporting yeah That it was

He was he said something to the effect of in a perfect world. We would never get there. Yes, and Then that was taken like a peripheral, we would never get there. Yes. And then that was taken, like in a perfect world, we would never get to needing the ESA. Correct. Which would wind up being if you polled a bunch of Americans and said, would you like to live in a world where the endangered species act was never necessary? Everyone would go, well, sure. act was never necessary. Everyone would go, well sure, he says that and it's that he must mean he's gonna get rid of it. It was just funny. It was like it was a wild extrapolation. But I see what they were getting at. They were getting at that it'd be like oh they're gonna use a squishy definition, right? Like here's the

fear I'm guessing, like what's driving the mentality would be that you get down to 10 black-footed ferrets and someone said like, wow, they really should have ESA protection. And they'd be like, don't worry. We just ordered 200. Yep. Right. But what's missing in that?

Like that's like, I think that's what they're getting at. That would become the play. What's missing in that sort I think that's what they're getting at. That would become the play. In that menu of options in order in the next species of interest, what's missing in that whole thing is habitat. And that's what I think a lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very hard line stance are missing is this idea that recovery has very specific parameters around habitat requirement and sustainable population in the wild So in order to achieve recovery, there's this habitat requirement

Also, I think de-extinction technologies and using de-extinction technologies to recover endangered species Also has this really great sort of beacon of hope and sort of inspirational effort that if we said tomorrow we could Bring back the ivory build woodilled woodpecker, would we start suddenly protecting, doing a better job of protecting habitat in Arkansas? Well that's the thing, I mean, the ESA comes with what many people would call like onerous regulations, right, regarding protecting habitat. Other people would be like, oh no no it's like we need that anymore yeah so bringing them back doesn't necessarily solve the problem exactly it

is a tool that could help accelerate and scale recovery yeah that's what it is I want I want to narrow one on the ivory build woodpecker maybe you can correct me on some of this but here's why it excites me. It's like, there still is habitat. There is, it's actually more today than when they went extinct. Yeah, like, I mean, there was a lot of habitat destruction that led to the problem, but there is habitat. This was so recent, right?

There's people alive right now, there are people alive that saw ivory-billed woodpeckers. There's actually like photographs of them. There's a reel to reel video of what they think was the last ivory-billed woodpecker leaving as Singer was cutting down the tree. Yeah. Like it's pretty powerful stuff.

Yeah, there's like, yeah, that's the craziest part about it. Dan Flores talks about that in Wild New World. Is they're like, oh yeah, there's some in that tree. I mean, I'm not joking. Literally, they actually cut the tree during a logging project. There was a contentious logging project.

Cut the tree. No one really knew that it was the last ones, but they knew it was damn near, and it turned out probably to be the last ones. They cut the tree down with really knew that it was the last ones But they knew it was damn near and turned out probably to be the last ones they cut the tree down Yeah with the thing in there as like a hey, man. Don't tell me what to do kind of thing So here you have where there's habitat It's It like it's hard to put it Like it might as well have not gone extinct It's like, it's hard to put it.

Like it might as well have not gone extinct. Do you know what I mean? Like it's like, it went extinct. It seems to almost have gone extinct by like a freak chance. Or it might as well, if it didn't, if it had stayed intact, we wouldn't think it was weird. Yeah.

Follow me? Yep. If we had kept short-faced bears intact, it would be a thing that people were marked on. Every time they killed a person, you know, it'd be like, my God, can you believe, right? The same way we marvel over alligators, we marvel over grizzy bears, we marvel over polar bears,

it'd just be a bird. Yep. It'd be like a bird. It was kind of cool, but like a bird, you know? So like, it's not an earth shattering environmental thing to have it around. The ranch and farm community is not gonna have a,

be jeopardized by this. I can't think of anyone except a pilliated woodpecker that would maybe be annoyed. They're like, dude, we were the biggest woodpecker, now we're not. They might be annoyed, but it's just, it doesn't seem like there's friction. No, there's not.

There is a technical challenge. You go like, how would you feel about bringing the ivory bill woodpecker back? Most people would be like, the what? Yeah. Like, woodpecker is here not long ago, we're gonna put it back, it's bill woodpecker back most people be like the what yeah like us woodpecker is here not long ago we're gonna put it back it's a woodpecker they probably like okay like that seems to me just from a novice perspective that seems to me like the thing to do first well first is hard

right there there's technical challenges and de-extinction of a bird. So we have the Dodo project, which is our flagship avian species. And this is sort of leading the charge and overcoming the technical challenges. The biggest challenge is there is an important step in de-extinction where you've edited a cell line to the point where you go,

this is now a cell of the animal of interest. This is now a dire wolf cell. Now we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is, you know, most famously Dolly the sheep cloning. That's called somatic cell nuclear transfer. And that's taking your the DNA from that cell, removing the DNA of an egg cell and putting your DNA in. And that fertilizes the cell and it becomes an embryo and then you can transfer it into a surrogate With birds very early on in the development of their egg. They're calcifying the outside of it All right, we can't access the eggs internally of the of a bird. We have to wait for them to lay those eggs So we are creating new platforms in order to edit

Germ cells or that cells that eventually become sperm and egg. Oh it germ cells or the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. So as egg is laid you can window the egg, you can extract a few microliters of blood, you can plate that blood and take out what we call them primordial germ cells. Those primordial germ cells are the cells that are circulating freely in the blood of this early fetus. And they eventually migrate to the gonads and they become sperm or egg depending on the gender of that egg. If we then edit those while they're plated, you can create a stable line of these in vitro. Then now you have edited the germ cell that will eventually become sperm or egg. And then in a different egg, which is sort of an egg that's been engineered to be sterile, so they don't produce any of their own sperm or egg and then in a different egg which is you know sort of an egg that's been engineered to be sterile so they don't produce any of their own

sperm or egg. At that same point of development you inject your edited germ cells they migrate to the gonads and then you could have a pigeon or chicken that's creating the sperm or egg of a dodo when they breed they give birth they lay a dodo egg or in this, and I rebuild woodpecker egg. So we're overcoming those challenges right now. We don't know a lot about woodpeckers, so we need to study more. Last year we launched Colossal's nonprofit, the Colossal Foundation. I'm the executive director of that foundation,

which is meant to sort of be where the rubber of de-extinction meets the road. Where? Meaning the road being the regulatory structure. Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally keep species off our to-do list? But also in some cases there's a North American conservation focus of that. So one of the flagship projects for the foundation is the ivory-billed woodpecker. What is more is it Mauritius?

Mauritius, yeah. What is their attitude it Mauritius? Mauritius, yeah. What is their attitude toward the Dodo? It's interesting, it's a it is a culturally significant icon of Mauritius. It is also closely associated with colonization, right? As colonizers showed up they brought this species that wiped out this the Dodo. Now what's interesting there was not... Wasn't it people that wiped out the Dodoodo. Now what's interesting is there was not... Wasn't it people that wiped out the Dodo? Yeah it was the colonizers that came in right but what's interesting is Mauritius didn't have an indigenous people at that

time. So they sort of came into the island they introduced invasive species so it was primarily rats and cats that were introduced to the island that started decimating a ground nesting bird and a flightless bird at that. That's what led to the dodo. Plus, I thought they just ate them all. There is a common misconception that they were a favorite food of sailors. There are also some really interesting, funny logs

you can read of sailors that said they would bring them on to provision the boat and then people would just resent having to eat it because it was all they had. It was this gross, greasy bird. Got it. So it was probably some combination thereof. But the real issue was habitat was being destroyed

as people came in to make room for colonies and invasive species were just wiping out nests and the dodo hadn't evolved with a mammalian predator. So it didn't have this natural instinct to run or to do anything. So, you know, I think they said from the time Dodo was discovered to it when extinct was 80 years. That's just a really rapid extinction of it.

Um, so Mauritius is really interested in recovering the Dodo. Um, they would look on Mauritius. Yeah. So we engaged directly with the government of Mauritius with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to talk about how can we use de-extinction to drive conservation projects and habitat restoration projects on the island of Mauritius and the islets that surround Mauritius.

And then also, in preparation for a dodo, can we start to find habitat, suitable habitat, that would include us removing invasive species, not just invasive animals, but invasive plants have taken over? How can we restore the lost ebony trees? How can we start to bring back the forest of 1600s in order to prepare it for the Dodo? And so there's this amazing interest. We have this great under swell of support. We've launched a council of people, a stakeholders group that is about 10,15 people that sort of represent a variety of industry from tourism to science to government and regulatory so that we can begin to

say hey we're making progress towards restoring the Dodo from extinction what do we need to be doing here with the people of Mauritius with the land of Mauritius in order to make sure society society is prepared and ecosystems are prepared make sure society's prepared and ecosystems are prepared. So crystal ball it for me. What, okay, never, not the science, the social component. If you had to crystal ball the social component, what are the odds socially, socially regulatory, whatever,

that you would get, that you could get to where they would say, let's do it, let's take this little islet and let's put some out and they're just gonna, they're gonna just live or die based on their ability to make a living here. 99%. I would never say anything's 100% because we could get wiped out by an asteroid,

but right there's- I don't know what I mean. I'm ruling out that. I'm ruling out that the earth kind of keeps going along. Yeah, okay. I think it's 99%. Okay. Beth and I went to Mauritius last year and had an incredible visit.

We're going again this year, and the idea is to kind of keep these conversations moving forward. Mauritius has done an incredible job on their own of going and recovering some of the islets around there. There's this really famous island or islet on the north end of Mauritius has done an incredible job on their own of going and recovering some of the islets around there There's this really famous island or islet on the north end of Mauritius called round island It's this massive round rock island You know you can't even you know we landed a helicopter on it in order to get out there And you're sort of at this 20 degree angle as you land and you're landing on top of giant tortoises And it was basically an island that

you land and you're landing on top of giant tortoises. And it was basically an island that was stripped down to just the rock. All the soil and plant life had been completely eradicated because they had introduced goats. And the goats were left there so that when you sailed by, you could pick up a few, you know, and you could provision the boat. Well, they just grazed the hell out of the whole thing. And basically every species native to that little islet was basically wiped out. So they've been recovering it for 20 years.

And when you go and see where they were to where they are today, it's incredible work. For other reasons, they've been recovering it. Yeah, yeah, they just wanted to bring back ground islet. It has a lot of endemic species that were important to try to save. So they're already doing this great work. I think Colossal's showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance, bring more funding,

try to bring technology to the table to do just that. So the reason why I think it's so high in Mauritius, the chances are so high in Mauritius, it's because there's all these islets that are sort of like living laboratories. You can mitigate risk of some of these fears around GMOs or what is gonna be the effect of this reintroduction by putting them on an island. Yeah, like if suddenly tomorrow, all the grizzly bears in the lower 48 went extinct. Caught a virus.

And you guys were like, oh, that's okay, we can repopulate. There's still only, so there's not a lot of appropriate habitat available for them. Right. So in an island situation, you have way more control. Yeah.

Like, but it, but it seems like your challenge is not like growing the animal. It's like cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully. Yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges around preparing the habitat for one of these animals and making sure the protections are in place, but also making sure that the people are ready for that.

I think this is a huge step for a society to say, we want to take this next step. Whoever will be the first government regulator culture to say, we want to introduce a species returned from extinction to the wild. I mean, that is a massive step. I mean, that is going to take somebody very bold. And I think that's why island nations are a

little more, uh, they have a little more opportunity because they can mitigate the risk, uh, because they don't have to worry about their neighbors. Say, you know, time out, you're doing what? You know, if we did this in the US, Canada would say, what the hell are you doing? We know it's a little bit interesting. A similar approach was we want to introducing wild turkeys in a lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. So, they think that historically you had turkeys in what's today 34 states, now we have turkeys in 49 states. Very little friction. I remember one state there was some friction in there and it was worried about a some rare anole. Um, and these guys went up doing a big, uh, uh, crop survey,

like bird crops, you know, and they just didn't find anything analogous to this in wild turkeys around the world or around the country. Like it just doesn't seem to think turkeys would prey on. Yeah. But that was like one little test and they let them go. And I want to be in it. We always talk about, well, you have like invasives, which are bad, but it wanted to be in like, it's like a species of no known negative. It's like no, no negative. But the climate's changed so much, you might not get away with that, what they were doing with turkeys in the 70s, 80s, early 90s. You might not today be able to go into, I'm not trying to pick on California,

today might not be able to go into California and say, hey, we're gonna turn some, while Turkey's loose. Oh, like the cultural climate's changed. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like you might hit resistance for something that was just, that happened.

Because if you look at like the shift too, in the 50s, they brought Audad into Texas. They brought Ibex into New Mexico. They brought Oryx into New Mexico. And there was kind of a, let's just see what happens. Like they can't be bad attitude that's built up resistance. And now even when people look like with Elk, we've only recovered Elk on 14% of his,

20% of historic range, 14% of historic range. It's kind of mind boggling. And that recovery effort is ground to a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just there's a less of an appetite to move cervids from one area to another because like disease transmission So it is in the conversation about will we get to a place where we're actually trying to do this It's like that the appetite

Seems to be just generally declining to like any kind of dice rolling. Oh, yeah I think you know, there is a certain aspect of this that is you know better and you do better right so we know that these animals you know a foreign animal or an invasive animal would have certain impacts on an ecosystem so that is important that we have take that precautionary approach because now we know better so we must do better however I think the pendulum swung all the way. Any change is bad. And right now if we do anything, if we try to change anything about the status quo, there are things we cannot account for

yet. Therefore, we should not take that step. And so we've moved into this fear based decision-making, which is grinding recovery to a halt of a lot of species. Like I just mentioned with elk. Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to sort of, the pendulum needs to come back to the center. I think, you know, in most things in life, this moderate approach is probably the best approach. So how can we make the most informed decision while also having a certain appetite for risk? With this idea that without risk there is no chance for a win out out there right we need to take certain risks in order to recover species you mentioned earlier that you didn't care for the reporting by Washington Post and

Cowboy State Daily who did a good job of covering the story well we had a lot of great folks I mean you know obviously we were blown away that we got the cover Time magazine and time did a great job Jeff Pluger he did this great article on the whole thing The New Yorker broke our embargo and published the story So although we're mad at them if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's pretty good Did they know they were breaking it? Yeah, they did. there's you know, there's I'll just put it this way There's some emails going back and forth saying can we do this? We said no, and then they did it anyways

So that was heartbreaking because there's so you know There's 175 people at colossal that we're working their tails off to do this thing Our marketing team was killing themselves our PR teams are killing themselves to have this really ambitious launch event And then for somebody to selfishly try to go first was really frustrating but despite all of that New Yorker read a pretty cool piece now that said he gave me like the dumbest quote ever in that thing so I'm a little upset about it gave you a bad quote yeah well you know I was I was out of the country when he was visiting so I was zooming into a few calls and he was interviewing me over zoom and I just

didn't have a lot of time he basically said what do you do here? I'm chief animal officer. It's not a title people really know what the hell it means I'm not sure I know what it means. It's like you're a zookeeper One of my guys on my team calls me the chief pet officer, yeah So I just told him I play with animals just joking. Of course, that's the one thing he published So I just told him I play with animals just joking. Of course, that's the one thing he publishes I was like there's a lot of thought that goes into what I do, right but but it was fine But yeah, I think there was a vast majority. I'd say 95% of the of the things that were published I thought were fair balanced Shed a positive light on what we were doing

5% of them were hyper negative to as like almost just for the purpose of clickbait. Yeah. Well, I mean you have to acknowledge that there's a real stirring of the pot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you're stirring the pot. That's what I like about it. I think the conservation pot needs to be stirred. Yeah. Like I said, I think we've gone to this fear-based approach where, you know, in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at the third point where we said, you know,

we're doing the worst thing, which is we're not making decisions. But do you guys feel an urgency to, you're not gonna stop messing around with ancient extinct species, but do you feel an urgency to like do something like more timely like with a species that is like... I mean the American Red Wolf is a good example of how what exactly what we're doing but the Foundation, the Colossal

Foundation has 45 conservation partners. That's 45 separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation. Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock the language of wolves right here in Yellowstone, working with Yellowstone Wolf Project, Yellowstone Forever, Jeff Reed and the Grizzly Systems team, trying to unlock language in a way that we can track wolves over space and time without requiring collars and understand what are they talking about. to conferring resistance to toxins from invasive species.

The northern quoll from the northern territory of Australia is being decimated because one of the animals it predates on is the invasive cane toad, which has a bufotoxin. That neurotoxin kills the quoll when they eat them. So we've actually found one base pair change that animals that co-evolved with the cane toad in South America have evolved that. So we're changing that one base parent quoll, and we've already shown in the lab that it confers resistance to bufotoxin. So now we can give that to the government of Australia and say, here is a tool for you guys to recover your northern quoll. And as a bonus, they'll eat all those cane toads that are invasive and are sort of one of the most famous examples of an invasive species.

We also created a vaccine to help elephants with one of the most deadly viruses they face, the elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus, which kills about 30% of elephants in human care. And more and more, we understand that is decimating wild populations. So, you know, we have 45 of these projects ongoing. Obviously what makes it to the top of that,

of the storyline is always de-extinction. But that's the power of de-extinction is it does bring awareness, it brings attention, it brings funding. You know, $450 million we've raised over four years to support the business of Colossal, and we've raised another $75 million for the Colossal Foundation. So we talk about conservation as an under-resourced fight.

We're bringing resources to the table. These are not a distraction of resources from places where you would have normally given money to WWF. Now, we're going to Silicon Valley. We're going to Silicon Valley. We're going to capital, you know, venture capital investors. And what are they getting though? Like what in the end, cause you're not a nonprofit, you're not an environmental organization. Yeah. You have, oh, not there's a foundation, but then there's a for-profit

component. What in the end, what is the product? The product is the, all of the technology we're creating. So it's more about process, less about product. We're is the all of the self-sufficient businesses. One is a computational biology platform. So it's an AI tool that essentially helps you compare genes of animals and understand this gene codes for this trait. Got it. That type of thing. The clients being universities and research facilities. Exactly. I got you.

Another one is a plastics degradation company. So we've identified a microbe that's able to to consume almost every plastic we've ever thrown at it. Everything from really soft plastics to very hard high density plastics, and we're using genetic engineering to try to enhance those types of qualities. And so this gives us a new tool in the way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle them

into smaller pieces of plastic, microplastics. This is breaking down the molecular bonds of this. So that's sort of what we're doing is we're this incubator of technology that we can spin out and it funds the whole program. I've seen how Raptor Recovery Centers when they're feeding like an eagle chick or a hawk chick they'll cover themselves in a bed sheet and they'll put like a puppet on their hand to feed the chicks to prevent human imprinting. What kind of protocols do you guys have

about dealing with your three dire wolves? Like how many humans have they seen? Oh, they've probably seen say 15 or 20 humans. But they see four or five on a regular basis. These are not candidates for release into the wild. So we take a slightly different approach, right? If we're creating a stable population of captive animals that could eventually go back into

the wild, which is not the case with the dire wolves, but with the red wolves that we cloned, you know, this generation is not a candidate for rewilding. We'll begin to take a more hands-off approach as you create subsequent generations and model after very similar projects that are already going on with red wolf release into North Carolina, Mexican gray wolf into the American Southwest. So mammals are a little different they don't imprint the way birds do. Birds have a very strong imprint potential so it's you can really mess a chick up if if it imprints on a human whereas with mammals they don't take that same level of habituation.

There's a certain degree of like learned behavior too, right? Like wolves need to be taught how to hunt by their pack and... So there's a lot of opportunity for cross fostering. So you can create puppies and then you would drop into dens of wild wolves if you wanted to. Like say this was a gray wolf project As you know the the pack it leaves the den for a bit You can go and drop puppies in and that's called cross fostering so we could do that drop bunch nerks. Someone's gonna get

But as far as like you'd never You would never get be able to get to a situation where you would have real like dire wolves teaching dire wolves how to be dire wolves you know it that's impossible yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't say it's impossible generations to get to but you'd first have to know what there's no way to find out yeah I mean this kind of goes back to some of the debate that you know I thought people were gonna say you made a dire wolf what the hell this thing's an enormous hyper carnivore

And really what they were going well, that's not a dire wolf Well, you're so sure that's not a dire wolf. Can you please tell me what a dire wolf is? Because if you can't tell me definitively what it is, you can't tell me what it isn't you know, there's there's a lot of nuance to taxonomy and We don't know how transgenics fall into taxonomy. Taxonomy wasn't built with this idea that suddenly along the evolutionary tree, something just pops up on its own branch. So transgenics really challenge taxonomic classification.

So we're trying to help the world cope with that. We're trying to challenge taxonomists to figure out, because transgenics are not going to stop a dire wolf. They won't stop with colossal. They're synthetic biology is now a tool that conservation can use to cover number of animals, a number of species issues. There will be the use of one gene from one animal put into another animal. And then they go, well, how do you now classify that animal? You know, taxonomy wasn't built to handle that. But the thing in the behavior thing though, this isn't a hack on it, but I'm saying like

you just, you might get where you can win the debate and say like based on an agreed upon definition this is a dire wolf, but what the problem is When you if you say like behaviorally There's no foundation for it. We can't say definitively. No, you would never know what the animal was doing. We haven't studied it I mean there's how many species across the world that are alive today that we don't know behaviorally what they do What is their function with an ecosystem? Yeah, you know, so it's it's a valid point. It's one that It will challenge the extinction as we go forward But I don't think it's a reason to not pursue the exit has there been anything with their behavior that really surprises

The people who watch them like they never howl or boy. They sure like digging holes They love sticks. Oh big fans of sticks like wolf They love sticks. Big fans of sticks right now. Wolf puppies love sticks? I don't know. I mean, I don't think they get a lot of sticks. Okay. We'll have to see. They like carrying bones around.

Do you guys like going there and cuddle with them or will they rip your arm off? Yeah, at this point, there's no cuddling at this point. We were pretty specific. Early on, contact was only what was required for the care and health of the animal. Uh, now contact is basically not required. We'll drive in, in order to drop feed and things like that. They also have a, an indoor building that they have access to and it's sort of a smaller pen where they, we can coax them into that so that we can do some basic

management stuff. If we ever had to, you know, anesthetize an animal because it was sick or injured. Um, we use these areas. So there is some habituation to those areas because it's a management advantage for us to be able to not have to go out there and dart one. So what about their behavior surprised you though? I don't know. It's so early, it's hard to say, right?

Because they were just really goofy puppies that were around people and now they're really developing into their own. I think the level of, despite the habituation early on in their life, the level of flight distance that they still maintain with people outside of like two people on my team is pretty startling, whereas I've worked with a lot of other captive wild canids and they are go, oh, person equals food and they come running over that these guys do not have that there is a real fear of new people new things they how like they do yeah they do they they have a good how there's really you know famous video that we put on YouTube that was their first howl which was pretty powerful moment for the team you know sitting there holding them in one of the vet techs that works in the clinic we were given

we were doing a checkup on him it was like singing a song a Little Mermaid song and there's a part where it's like a and she starts doing that and all of a sudden both boys just popped into a howl that was pretty pretty incredible. Is there body size on track with what you'd expect the body size of a dire wolf to be? Yeah so we're like you know fossil record kind of suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that hundred thirty hundred forty pounds up to 160 pounds. I think we're on pace for 140 pounds where we stand today we're seven and a half months just shy of a hundred pounds as is their

growth curve is definitely leveling out, but you know, what we know from gray wolves is we could expect them to continue to grow until they're about 12, 15 months. And then from there, they'll continue to put on weight, but they're, they're pretty tall, leggy animals as they are today. I'm excited for this.

I ever build woodpecker situation. Well, yeah, I mean, we got to, we got to get you down to the lab and we can show you what we're doing with, with the woodpecker stuff. You know who else wouldn't like it? Steve are the people who claim they see them now because they kind of, they're like special. We get that on the thylacine project too.

Oh, no need. There's one behind my own. We were at a town hall meeting because we, we will visit Tasmania and have town halls and try to hear from, from the locals. And we have a, at that thylacine stakeholder group. And one of them said, you know, I, uh, this is 10 years ago, I was pumping gas down at this intersection. I saw one run by, you know, it's like, I don't want to be rude,

but if they do exist, I don't think they're visiting gas stations. Do you guys use that term Lazarus? We haven't used it. Yeah. But it's, it's good. It's a good analogy. Oh, I was going to get to this, but we're running out of time, but a crystal ball, it on crystal ball, it on Tasmania saying, hell yeah, let's cut some theisines loose I think the chances will go much higher once we have a theisine in hand because I think they will suddenly be oh this is a real thing that we need to be very serious about Australia has a very conservative approach to wildlife

management yeah and they've been burned knows they don't have any non-natives. They've been burned in the past, right? Cane toads is a great example. I can see that. So I think there will be an onerous process in order to get there, but I would say, yeah, you know, that's sort of 75-85% chance that they will definitely come along. I think Mauritius is much more willing to take that. What was the percent chance on Tasmania? 7585 really optimistic. I'm telling you once these animals are back I think we'll be fighting people to say why is it in Texas in the United States and not in Tasmania? Yeah

um I Love Willem Dafoe. Yeah, one of the worst movies made this horrible movie his final scene movie. It's really bad Just the logic yeah, it had magical backpack syndrome. Yep What is that? Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack Oh, but also the movie didn't am I using like all sorts of shit. It's like wow Producing like all sorts of shit. It's like wow Like a Harry Potter bag. They just keep pulling stuff out of it, and it's it's just the logic It was like a great they're like we should do something or the idea is we should do something around Tasmanian tires

Uh-huh right and then that's just what came out in the end terrible. I Love willem de foe. I assume you want to come on the show. I'd love to have me I assume your company has competitors have they Have they been excited for you guys have they been critical of what you've done Are they like damn we thought we'd land on the moon first I think as far as I'm aware were the only de extinction species preservation There's nobody else the only people we truly compete with would be other nation states You know Korea has pursued some of this stuff

We know China has an interest in it, but it's not really at a company level. Okay. I think you're about to security. I think you're about to see people come in, but they're about $450 million five years late. Are you guys constantly discouraged? Are you guys constantly getting like petitioned by people or organizations about like their pet de-extinction project or their pet project to prevent something from their animal? You know what I mean? We get a lot of that where it's you know, hey, thylacine is a really cool project, but did you consider about like the red-piliated Northwest woodpecker, right? It's like some random bird that you go, well, I didn't actually, let me look it up.

And you go, well, it's not really just extirpated from that area it's still around yeah there you get a lot of that type of stuff. Thanks for coming on man. Hey always great to be here. You guys can come on any time you want. I appreciate that because I'll take you up on that because you know we're working in Yellowstone on a pretty regular basis now so we're up in your neck of the woods. People aren't gonna like to hear that I don't think well it's not direwolf related let me give you my end let me give you my end sentiment about the whole thing I think there's things that happen in American culture global culture whatever there's

things that happen to make everyone dumber there's things that happen to make everyone smarter right this is definitely whatever it ends up having like whatever happens with Romulus and Remus, like whatever happened, this made everybody smarter because everybody said, wow, I never really thought about what is a species? What is de-extinction? How do you define a blank? Is this okay or not okay? Like everyone got smarter.ormous stuff happens. Everybody gets dumber. I love that I I'm gonna steal that from you as well because I think of things that made everybody dumber. This is net positive Well, I think I talk. Yeah

Everybody got dumber. Yeah people got a lot dumber tick-tock. Yeah net positive for the world I think that's you know, if we're boiling down the story, this is a net positive because no one got hurt nobody got hurt. We're injecting You know we're injecting science into pop culture. We're injecting conservation We're you know if you look at Google search terms and hashtag trends from when we launched that first week We saw all-time highs of Google searches for red wolf for conservation for the term extinction No, you know if we can push this into a for the term extinction. You know, if we can push this into a dinner table conversation for families to have with their kids

to talk about the biodiversity crisis, that is a win in and of itself. Yeah, but the other thing is you didn't siphon off of limited federal spending. It was like willing seller, willing buyer, willing investor, willing investment. Ben loves to say, we spared the world another shitty software company. I like that.

I like that. Yeah. It's a pot stirrer, dude, but it made everybody smarter. Exactly. No, I like, I like it. It's like, it's like a real mental, um, it causes a lot of mental wrestling. Yeah. You know, what was that quote we had recently?

That's the last thing I'm gonna say, but it's not really applicable here, but I think we're talking to Dan Flores. No, it's a great quote. Dan Flores was saying about historians. He goes, the reason the arguments are so, the reason the arguments are so vicious is there's nothing at stake.

But he was just making a joke about his own discipline as a historian, you know, like how could people get so worked up about Clovis first or whatever, right? But there's something at stake here. But I think the main thing is it's like, not the main thing, it's just fun to watch. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's fun to watch people like all of a sudden arguing about stuff that the day before they didn't know. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's fun to watch. People like all of a sudden arguing about stuff the day before they didn't know. Yeah, it's perfect. You guys should do an Irish Elk next. I won't tell you we're not going to do an Irish Elk. Hunters would love that. Dire wolves could eat them.

It works for me. He's got the amusement park figured out. Thanks, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. Steve Rinella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today.

I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history. And, uh, I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the MeatEater podcast network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. This is an iHeart Podcast.