If you got excited about the hyped “resurrection” of dire wolves, a species evidently chosen as a tie-in to Game of Thrones, get ready for a splash of cold water. Even the USA Today reporter covering the “Celebrities” beat seemed to grasp the reality. Under the headline, “George R.R. Martin got to hold a dire wolf. Extinct animal’s ‘rebirth…has stirred me’,” Mike Snider pulled his punch: “Little did [Martin] know he would eventually get to hold a real dire wolf — well, as close as one likely ever produced.” Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin takes down the claim from the folks at Colossal Biosciences, the “de-extinction company”: “These are not dire wolves: these are gray wolves with 20 edited genes. The way they are selling this is not only misleading, it doesn’t do justice to the science that they’ve done and the applications they will pursue.” 

I fell in love with them as a kid visiting the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Many dire wolf skulls pulled up from the fragrant tar can be seen there (at the top). Resurrecting, or “de-extincting,” dire wolves would be cool. But this isn’t it. For one thing, the physical genome that can be edited, as our own evolutionary biologist colleague Richard Sternberg underlines, is not all there is to describing any creature, gray wolf or dire wolf or human being. Very far from it. The immaterial genome cannot be edited. More on that coming up on April 28.