Do the shadow wolves from Game of Thrones really exist again? A US company claims to have successfully used genetic engineering to resurrect an extinct species.
It sounds like something out of Jurassic Park: scientists at the US company Colossal Biosciences claim to have brought back the shadow wolf, which has been extinct for 13,000 years. Game of Thrones fans, of course, know Aenocyin dirus as a majestic fantasy creature that could now walk among us again.
In a nod to the fantasy series that brought interest in direwolves into the mainstream, the first female of the revived species was named Khaleesi, and the first two males are twins and classically named Romulus and Remus.
How the direwolves known from Game of Thrones were brought back – and why there are doubts
The comparison to Jurassic Park is unfortunately a bit misleading and, for that very reason, brings skeptics onto the scene: the extinct Canis lupus lupus, which used to inhabit America, was not brought back with the help of cloned DNA, as the dinosaurs were in Michael Crichton’s science fiction novel. Instead, according to Tagesschau, genetic techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 were used to modify gray wolf cells, which were then carried as dog embryos. Pure shadow wolf DNA is now too outdated and damaged to be copied directly.
Rather, we are dealing with a synthetic species that resembles the 70-kilogram Schattenwolf, but is actually a modified gray wolf. The two wolf species are not even from the same genus. Nevertheless, from a research point of view, it is an exciting development by the start-up, so far everyone agrees. It’s just not the wild scientific miracle that some people are currently trying to sell it as.
Watch the video of Colossal Biosciences about their shadow wolves here:
Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin is beside himself about the wolves
One person who is more delighted than most about the return of the wolves, which had become fantasy creatures in the meantime, is George R.R. Martin. On his personal blog, he devoted a lengthy post to the resurrected direwolf and proclaimed D-Day (Direwolf Day). Incidentally, he received an early tip about the biotech news from fellow fantasy author Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), who put him in touch with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm even before the public announcement.
In GRRM’s blog post, he writes:
Shadow Wolves are special to me. Why? I just don’t know. As a child, I wasn’t even allowed to have a dog, let alone a wolf. But a few decades ago, I visited the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A., and when I saw the exhibition of 400 skulls of shadow wolves on one wall, something stirred in me.
For the creation of his Game of Thrones fantasy world, the shadow wolves were even more important than some fans might realize. Martin continues:
Most of my readers will know the story of how, in the summer of 1991, while writing a science fiction novel, a scene came into my head – the first chapter of Game of Thrones, in which the direwolf pups are found in the summer snows. Where did it come from? Why did it grab me so? I have no idea. But it gripped me so much that I put the other novel aside and started writing A Song of Ice and Fire. The direwolves were a big part of it. Without them, Westeros might not exist.
Whether the same or similar techniques will bring back the mammoth and the dodo in the future remains to be seen. But it’s still a long way to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and along the way we should probably ask ourselves: Do we need this?
