Origin of proxies

Some 2.6 million years ago, when glaciers covered huge parts of the globe, and modern humans had still not evolved, a ferocious, yet social canine roamed the Earth, alongside megafauna like woolly mammoth, ground sloths and sabre-toothed tiger. The canine, dire wolf, also known as Aenocyon dirus in scientific lexicon, was as supersized as its contemporaries, hunted in packs and fed on horses, ground sloths and bison. Even as the Earth underwent significant shifts between cold and warm periods during the Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch that lasted till 11,700 years ago, the canine survived. It in fact changed its physical traits to survive the dramatic climate shifts, adapted to diverse habitats like boreal grasslands, coastal woodlands and tropical wetlands, establishing its range from Alaska in North America to Mexico, Peru and Venezuela in South America. Then Earth entered the current Holocene epoch, marking the end of the Ice Age and shift to a warmer, more stable climate. Several megaherbivores declined, increasing competition for food among packs and possibly between dire wolves and modern humans, the Homo sapiens. The canine may have also found the climate shift challenging. Ultimately, dire wolf went extinct between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago.

But only to be resurrected in 2024. At least so claims the US-based Colossal Biosciences Inc, which on April 7, 2025, announced the “resurrection” of the dire wolf, marking the “world’s first de-extinction”. The company introduced six-month-old male pups Remus and Romulus and confirmed the birth of a two-month-old female, Khaleesi. The names are a nod to the book series A Song of Ice and Fire that features dire wolves and incidentally whose author, George R R Martin, is an investor at Colossal.

Resurrection by proxy

As the “de-extinction” invoked equal amounts of awe and concern (more on this later), Colossal took to public platforms to decode the project. One fact that came to light quickly is that the pups primarily possess the gray wolf DNA, modified to give them the “appearance” of dire wolves. Dire wolves and gray wolves share 99.5 per cent of their DNA, according to Colossal’s press release. This was done through …

This article was originally published as part of the cover story Origin of Proxies in the May 1-15, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth