News broke last week that a genetics company had successfully genetically engineered three healthy dire wolf pups.

Yes, dire wolves were real. They lived during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene periods in North America. However, they were not wargs…they were about the same size as the very largest gray wolves, with the larger of the two subspecies averaging about 150 pounds.

That’s still an awfully big canine, but you can’t ride it. However, it was dire in another way…it had larger teeth and an extremely powerful bite. It specialized in hunting megafauna and became extinct as the megafauna died out.

The three pups, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi were reverse engineered from fossil DNA, using modern wolf DNA to “fill in the gaps” and, due to the rarity and value of wolves, dogs as surrogates. They actually don’t have much dire wolf DNA…this is more a fast way of selectively breeding things that look like dire wolves from wolves, rather like the rau quagga.

They have their own enclosure, certified by the AHS, but in a private location for obvious reasons. The next step is to see if they can form a pack and breed.

It’s being reported as the first successful deextinction, which is not accurate. Even if we can, should we?