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On Tuesday, April 8, Elon Musk tweeted about the revival of the extinct dire wolves. Musk shared the picture of a TIME Magazine cover, which featured a dire world that was allegedly "the first to exist in over 10,000 years". Some hours later, the Tesla owner retweeted his original tweet, writing in the caption:
"Please make a miniature pet wooly mammoth"
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Musk's tweet has since gone viral, receiving over 36 million views, 112K likes, 9K retweets, and 6K comments within hours of its upload. Some netizens demanded that the Irish Elks be returned, while others claimed they were waiting for the Dodo bird.
Other requests in the comments section included those of the Stellar's sea cows, mini saber-tooth tigers, and pot-bellied elephants. Meanwhile, other netizens shared countless variants of AI-generated pictures of Elon Musk with a mini woolly mammoth as his pet.
Dire wolves become the world's "first successfully de-extincted animal"
The dire wolves that Elon Musk was talking about in his viral tweet are the creation of Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotech company.
According to CNN, the scientists at Colossal announced on Monday, April 7, that they had created three dire wolf pups by using ancient DNA and gene-editing technology.
Employing the technology, the Colossal scientists altered the genes of a gray wolf - which happens to be the dire wolf's closest living relative. The outcome is a hybrid species that is essentially similar in appearance to the prehistoric dire wolves.
Ben Lamm, the co-founder and CEO of Colossal, said in the news release:
"This massive milestone is the first of many coming examples demonstrating that our end-to-end de-extinction technology stack works. Our team took DNA from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies."
The biotech company has worked to resurrect the dodo, mammoth, and Tasmanian tiger since 2021, keeping its dire wolf project secret until recently. These apex predators, larger than gray wolves, now live on a secured 2,000-acre site monitored by drones and security. The facility is USDA-registered and certified by the American Humane Society.
Love Dalen - a Stockholm University professor in evolutionary genomes - has differing views about de-extinction. Dalen said:
"There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% gray wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question."
Colossal Biosciences has confirmed to CNN that it used three large, mixed-breed hound dogs as surrogates for the dire wolf embryos. Two of the three pups - males - were born on October 1, 2024, while the third, a female pup, was born in January 2025.
