Category: extinction

ABC News (and me) on the Dire Wolf “de-extinction”

April 11, 2025 • 9:45 am

A reporter from ABC News interviewed me yesterday about the Dire Wolf, and her piece appears on their website today (see below). I had to find it myself because, as is usual, when I ask reporters to send me the link to a story for which I was interviewed, they all say “yes”, but only about 10% ever do.  Frankly, I think it’s kind of selfish to exploit scientists for their expertise and not even send them a lousy link.

Well, I digress, but this is in line with the kind of science journalism that has often accompanied the Dire Wolf story. Fortunately, the ABC article is pretty good.

First I’ll add a few comments.  My own view is that Colossal has behaved in a sleazy and overly secretive way with respect to their “de-extinction” and “we-are-big-conservationists” claims.  Some of the secrecy seems unwarranted. For example, they told the New Yorker reporter who wrote about the “Dire Wolf” what genes they had edited, but did not permit him to publish their identity.  Since the faux Dire Wolves are now romping around a secret pasture monitored by drones, there’s no chance that anybody else is going to do what Colossal did, so no need to hide the genes.

The paper about the “woolly mouse” is on bioRχiv, but is still not accepted for publication. (The accompanying note says “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.”)

And Colossal Bioscience is getting considerable flak from the better science journalists, and is getting peevish about it. They issued a press release yesterday that was defensive, clearly a response to the pushback they’re getting and heavily concerned with species definitions, trying to argue that the dire wolf is a “new species” even though it’s just a gray wolf with 20 DNA letters changed.  Here’s short excerpt of the two-page release:

We invested over a year collaborating with academic colleagues to improve the dire wolf paleogenome and decode the dire wolf’s evolutionary history. Our scientific manuscript has been submitted for peer review and posted to the preprint server–please go check it out.

I cannot find the preprint of the Dire Wolf paper anywhere on the web. If you can find it, let us all know. It would of course list the genes that had been changed.

You can read the ABC article by clicking below; it’s free. The article includes a ten-minute video of the project showing the “Dire Wolves” (I have to admit that they’re cute).  Note that Colossal decline to let the reporter see the faux Dire Wolves “up close,” though they showed her the videos.  And Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm asserts that they are on target to produce woolly mammoths by 2028! I’m ready to bet a thousand dollars that that won’t happen—especially if you define “de-exincted woolly mammoth” as being something with at least 50 gene edits that’s ready to release on the tundra.

Three quotes from Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal Biosciences, from the video in the article:

“. . . that animal looks like a dire wolf, it will behave like a dire wolf, and it is a dire wolf.”

“When I saw them born, and they were white, I was like: ‘we’ve done it–those are dire wolves.'”

“I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it is filling the role of that species, then you’ve done it.”

They are heavily invested in the claim that this really IS a dire wolf.  The press release makes that clear, as they’re trying to revise species definitions so that the Dire Wolf qualifies as a new species. From Colossal’s press release:

So many experts out there are demanding that species are defined solely by their DNA. That’s some version of “insane”. Even evolutionary biologists can’t agree on species definitions. Mammoth species? Defined by teeth ridges. Ancient bison? Horn shapes. And so arbitrarily that someone accidentally mixing up length and width measurements had zero impact on species classification. Brown bears and polar bears, humans and Neanderthals, wolves and coyotes are all different species unless you apply the most commonly taught species concept, which would classify them as the same species because they can interbreed and produce healthy, fertile offspring.

Getting dragged into arguments about species definitions is a distraction from the real achievement. This is the most significant advancement in gene-editing in history. Even our harshest critics admit it. As one of our founders stated, “this is the moon landing of synthetic biology.”

. . .We get it. We totally understand that some scientists are not comfortable calling these dire wolves because they feel like the wolves are not sufficiently genetically similar to a particular extinct individual to merit that name. That’s ok with us.  This is not a fight that we care about. We’re calling them dire wolves, and if you prefer something else (how about “Colossal’s dire wolves”?) that works too. And maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology.

This is a fight they don’t care about? I think they should care, at least a bit. They are calling these tweaked canids members of a new species, the “Dire Wolf”.  I prefer “gray wolves with fifteen DNA letters from dire wolves” or, better, “genetic variants of the gray wolf.” The whole hype around this animal is that it is a new species that existed in the past, not simply a minor variant of the gray wolf that is nowhere near being genetically similar to the extinct gray wolf.

Quotes from the ABC piece, including what I said:

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, the company behind the revived dire wolf and based in Dallas, said it is “a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts” and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.

However, bioethicists and ecologists say they are skeptical that the animals created are actually dire wolves and said there are ethical concerns including where the animals would be kept and if they could ever survive in the wild.

“All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures,” Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a leader in the development of the medical ethics field, told ABC News.

“Only adult dire wolves can raise a dire wolf and there aren’t any. … One thing that we know for sure, that they are not, is dire wolves.”

. . . Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the news of the resurrected dire wolf a “colossal fabrication” and referred to the species created as a “designer dog.”

“This is just a big dog with a few genes inserted from a once extinct wolf,” Pimm told ABC News. “Incidentally, a dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf.”

He went on, “It’s about as different to a regular wolf as we are from chimpanzees and if you inserted a chimpanzee gene into a human, I think that will be a horribly unethical thing to do.”

One of my beefs is that none of Colossal’s projects involve changing the behavior of the “de-extincted” organism, even though behavior is absolutely critical not only in bringing back a species as it really was, but allowing it to survive in nature.  Remember, wolves and mammoths are social animals, programmed to learn many things from their parents. And they have genetically coded behavioral repertoires whose genetic basis we do not understand. For example, maybe lichens tasted good to a Woolly Mammoth but wouldn’t to a replica tweaked by Colossal. Such a difference, if it existed, would likely be genetic.

A few more criticisms from the ABC piece:

However, today’s environment does not resemble the environment in which historic dire wolves lived and releasing them into the wild could harm the ecosystem.

“It has to live somewhere, and it isn’t clear what the environment was that the dire wolf lived in, or what it ate, or sort of its behavior, and so you kind of face a possibility you won’t know where to keep this animal that you made healthy,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News.

He added that the behavior of dire wolves was likely shaped by the packs they roamed in or packs that they may have competed against. However, those groups also don’t exist anymore.

“If you bring back something that’s been dead 10,000 or 40,000 or 100,000 years, you need to bring back its environment, not just the animal,” Caplan continued. “Otherwise, you potentially are going to have issues.”

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said there is no way to release the “de-extincted” dire wolves back into the wild because they wouldn’t know how to survive.

Coyne told ABC News that if the revived dire wolves are let loose into the wild “without the social group that they’re evolved to be in” it would be hard to expect them to “behave properly” around other animals because they’ve never been exposed to other species.

“So that’s also unethical, because those animals are kind of separate. They’re not going to have the right thing to eat, it’s not going to know what to eat, how to eat, probably got the wrong digestive system. … So that’s one of the ethical considerations.”

Colossal Laboratories did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment on these concerns.

Of course they wouldn’t!

Again, I think there is a destructive and perhaps unwitting collusion between Colossal and much of the press. Now the ABC piece by Mary Kakatos is fine, and gives the proper caveats and room for critics, but a lot of pieces don’t (see the New Yorker piece, for instance).  But the press isn’t going to get clicks by saying that “this is not a real Dire Wolf,” so they amp up the gee-whiz factor and dial down the critics. And, as you see above, Colossal is perfectly happy with the rah-rah press coverage. The real losers in all this are the public, who miss the chance to learn something about genetics and conservation.

And, by the way, Colossal should stop spreading the view that de-extinction is one way to keep us from worrying about endangered species, implying that we can always bring them back again with cloning, Crispr and surrogate mothers!

UPDATE: Beth Shapiro defends the criticisms leveled against the Dire Wolf project. Many of her points was in the press release. Click to hear (h/t Matthew Cobb). She is quite defensive.

An analysis of this statement followed by a thread. I can’t embed the Bluesky post, but click on it to go to the thread:

More on the “dire wolf”: Adam Rutherford is furious

April 9, 2025 • 10:45 am

Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)

All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)

Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine.  This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids.  Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner.  To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.

And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.

First, Adam announces his piece with a link.

The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z

The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:

A few excerpts:

Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience – the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs – released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.

Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.

Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.

ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.

There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:

I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.

Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.

And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company.”  Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at.  And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness.  For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.

Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf.  When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:

Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.

On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.

‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z

As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream.  Rutherford:

. . . the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.

Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:

Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:

Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z

WHAT?  A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”?  This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?

As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)

Coop gets in one more lick:

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z

Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”

Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves 😤🧪

— Science Sam (@samanthayammine.com) 2025-04-08T20:36:29.683Z

And somebody couldn’t resist comparing the Colossal wolf to the famous jackalope!

I’ll close with a few final posts from Rutherford, who, though unable to contain the profanity, is correct in what he says below:

Reposting this from last month, cos it’s the same bullshit from the same company that is flooding your media with wolfshit. Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossiblewww.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T06:16:47.426Z

Amen, brother! No clones, either!

Apropos of nothing:THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T16:56:07.751Z

Dire-ish wolf

April 8, 2025 • 11:30 am

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s&#8230;

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

Do we have more evidence that the Ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct?

April 19, 2022 • 1:00 pm

About a week ago I put up a post summarizing a new paper in bioRχiv by Latta et al. reporting the likely persistence of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) in an area of bottomland forest in Louisiana. Thought to have been extinct since about 1940, this largest American woodpecker was regarded as one of conservation’s great losses, like the Carolina Parakeet or the Passenger Pigeon.  Interest was revived after the publication of a 2005 paper in Science by Fitzpatrick et al., based on photographs and calls, suggesting that individuals of species still remained. But attempts to replicate those sightings failed, and disappointed birders were more convinced that the Ivorybill was indeed gone.

But now we have the Latta et al. report of living Ivorybills, and I find it a bit more convincing than the Science paper of 2005. The more recent report was based on a decade’s worth of drone and trail-camera footage with suggestive images showing the unique field marks of this bird, including its large size, its unique “manspreading” and laid-back stance on trees, and its white saddle and black-and-white wing markings. See my earlier post for the data that convinced me that there’s a decent chance this bird is still alive, though its restricted habitat would surely make it “endangered.”

The article below, from EcoWatch(click on screenshot) is of interest not because it gives new data, as it doesn’t (it’s a news report), but because it includes some newly released videos  taken in Louisiana in 2006 and 2008—between the two periods of research that led to the paper) that show more suggestive evidence of living ivorybills, including size, stance, its method of flying (sometimes folding up the wings), and white coloration.

Watch the YouTube video below and come to your own conclusions. (I’m sure birders will be more skeptical than I, and that’s great.)

The supplementary page cited on the YouTube page, which has additional video, shows that work was done largely by one Michael D. Collins, not an author of either paper. What we have, then, is one man giving his observations and measurements, and concluding that he’s seen Ivorybills rather than the smaller relative the Pileated Woopecker.  But the work was not trivial!

Now the will to believe is strong, and people want to think that the Ivorybill is still alive. But after watching the 24-minute video below, I have to say that my priors that the Ivorybill still exists have increased a bit.

Still, nobody is going to accept that this species is still alive until we get much better videos and  photos.  But have a look! Collins actually gives better location data than either paper cited above, which will of course entice the area to be flooded with birders. That may not be good, which is why those other papers did not divulge the exact location of their observations.

Another sad anniversary

September 7, 2014 • 3:27 pm

78 years ago today, the last thylacine, or “Tasmanian tiger”, died in a zoo. It was a carnivorous marsupial (one of only two marsupial species in which both sexes had pouches), and you can read all about it at The Thylacine Museum. There’s also some photos and information on Wikipedia, including this:

The thylacine had become extremely rare or extinct on the Australian mainland before British settlement of the continent, but it survived on the island of Tasmania along with several other endemic species, including theTasmanian devil. Intensive hunting encouraged by bounties is generally blamed for its extinction, but other contributing factors may have been disease, the introduction of dogs, and human encroachment into its habitat. Despite its official classification as extinct, sightings are still reported, though none have been conclusively proven.

Surviving evidence suggests that it was a relatively shy, nocturnal creature with the general appearance of a medium-to-large-size dog, except for its stiff tail and abdominal pouch (which was reminiscent of a kangaroo) and a series of dark transverse stripes that radiated from the top of its back (making it look a bit like a tiger).

His (or her, as we’re unsure of the sex) name was Benjamin, and, remarkably, there’s a bit of video to show us what the species looked like.

A bit about Benjamin from The Tylacine Museum:

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Some sightings of thylacines are still reported (but unconfirmed), and there’s a $250,000 reward for good evidence that the species still exists. I strongly doubt it, so let us mourn the loss of Benjamin as we mourned the loss of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died on Sept. 1, 1914.

h/t:  Ross Barnett via Matthew Cobb