Ich stelle fest, daß es für den Aenocyon dirus, im Englischen allgemein als dire wolf geläufig, bislang keine gebräuchliche deutsche Bezeichnung gibt.
Zitat Sein englischer Trivialname ist dire wolf (englisch dire ‚schrecklich, fürchterlich‘). Im Deutschen findet sich seit Anfang der 2020er Jahre Schattenwolf als Trivialname, in Analogie zur Bezeichnung ähnlich gestalteter Phantasiewesen im Fantasy-Genre und in Computerspielen
Zitat Colossal Biosciences®@colossal SOUND ON. You’re hearing the first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years. Meet Romulus and Remus—the world’s first de-extinct animals, born on October 1, 2024.
The dire wolf has been extinct for over 10,000 years. These two wolves were brought back from extinction using genetic edits derived from a complete dire wolf genome, meticulously reconstructed by Colossal from ancient DNA found in fossils dating back 11,500 and 72,000 years. This moment marks not only a milestone for us as a company but also a leap forward for science, conservation, and humanity. From the beginning, our goal has been clear: “To revolutionize history and be the first company to use CRISPR technology successfully in the de-extinction of previously lost species.” By achieving this, we continue to push forward our broader mission on—accepting humanity’s duty to restore Earth to a healthier state.
But this isn’t just our moment—it’s one for science, our planet, and humankind. All of which we love and are passionate about. Now, close your eyes and listen to that howl once more. Think about what this means for all of us. 4:12 PM · Apr 7, 2025
Zitat Nach 10.000 Jahren Ausgestorbene "Schattenwölfe" leben plötzlich wieder Erstmals seit Jahrtausenden leben wieder Dire Wolves: US-Forschern ist es angeblich gelungen, die riesigen Ur-Wölfe mit Gentechnik zurückzubringen.
Erstmals seit rund 10.000 Jahren leben wieder sogenannte Dire Wolves – riesige, längst ausgestorbene Ur-Wölfe. Die US-Firma Colossal Biosciences hat drei Tiere mithilfe gentechnischer Veränderungen aus dem Erbgut des heutigen Grauwolfs erschaffen.
Der Dire Wolf (Canis dirus, übersetzt in etwa "schrecklicher Hund") war größer und kräftiger als heutige Wölfe. Er lebte bis vor etwa 10.000 Jahren in Nord- und Südamerika, jagte große Beutetiere wie Bisons und hatte einen besonders starken Kiefer und große Zähne.
Anders als lange angenommen, war er kein direkter Vorfahre des Grauwolfs, sondern eine eigene Linie der Hundeartigen. Er konnte bis zu 70 Kilo wiegen und 1,50 Meter lang werden.
Für die Rückzüchtung analysierten die Forscher altes Erbgut aus Fossilien und veränderten 14 Gene im Genom lebender Wölfe. Die Tiere wurden per Kaiserschnitt geboren und leben nun unter ständiger Beobachtung.
Die Forscher hoffen, mit derselben Technik auch andere Arten wie das Mammut oder den Tasmanischen Tiger zurückzubringen – oder bedrohte Tiere widerstandsfähiger zu machen.
Robert Silverberg, seines Zeichens dienstältester lebender und noch schreibender SF-Autor (wenn auch als Zeitbeobachter und Kolumnenverfasser, nicht mehr als Erzähler), hat zwei seiner "Reflections"-Kolumen in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine dem Thema gewidmet: "Resurrecting the Quagga" (Juni 2007) (in dem es um die Rückzüchtungsversuche mit Zebras geht, nicht um diese ausgestorbene Art wieder zum Leben zu erwecken; sondern um Zebras zu züchten, die ihnen von Körperbau und Fellzeichnung her gleichen), und tatsächliche Pläne einer "genetischen Rekontruktion: "Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth?" (Sept.-Okt. 2022)
Zitat The idea of bringing extinct creatures back from the dead still has its fascination. I dealt with the notion myself about forty years ago in a story called "Our Lady of the Sauropods," in which I prudently put a bunch of recreated dinosaurs on a space satellite at a safe distance from Earth. (Michael Crichton, a few years later, chose the more exciting option of utting his "Jurassic Park" critters closer to home, where of course they got loose and caused all sorts of trouble.) And now a plan is afoot to restore to existence that conspicuous feautre of the ice-age world, the woolly mammoth.
PS. Stichwort "in Körperbau und Fellzeichnung gleichen":
Zitat
Zitat TIME@TIME TIME's new cover: The dire wolf is back after over 10,000 years. Here's what that means for other extinct species https://ti.me/4jlJB54 2:56 PM · Apr 7, 2025
Cam Clow@camthecowboyman After reading the article, they aren’t de-extincting dire wolves. They are genetically modifying grey wolves to phenotypically resemble what they think dire wolves looked like.
This is not a dire wolf.
Additionally, dire wolves most likely did not resemble modern day grey wolves due to the more tropical environment they resided in. Think African Wild Dogs, jackals, and dholes.
Aenocyon (the dire wolf) is a distinct genus from Canis (grey wolves). In other words: dire wolves are not even wolves.
It’s kind of insane that this article doesn’t even reference this? 5:28 PM · Apr 7, 2025
Pavel Osadchuk@xakpc·4h so it's a woolly mouse once again?
Cam Clow@camthecowboyman·4h Would you believe it’s the exact same company
Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger — the woolly mammoth.
This "woolly mouse" marks an important step toward achieving the researchers' ultimate goal — bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say.
"For us, it's an incredibly big deal," says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct species.
The company announced the creation of the woolly mice Tuesday in a news release and posted a scientific paper online detailing the achievement. Scientists implanted genetically modified embryos in female lab mice that gave birth to the first of the woolly pups in October.
Zitat Meet the ‘woolly mouse’: why scientists doubt it’s a big step towards recreating mammoths
But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.
“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”
Zitat Some of the stories this week included significant critiques of Colossal's claims, such as Nature's cautious and critical story, "Meet the ‘woolly mouse’: why scientists doubt it’s a big step towards recreating mammoths." Many did not.
What kind of breakthrough does the woolly mouse actually represent? Colossal has certainly proved that it can make a mouse have fluffy hair. Does this mean, then, that a Persian cat is more like a mammoth than a Siamese? You might ask, what does it really mean for something to be "mammoth-like"? It is a good question. "Mammoth-like," as Colossal is using the term, doesn't really mean anything. It could refer to an animal's appearance, its genes, its behavior, or anything, really, that makes it easier to call an animal "mammoth-like."
By this definition, people have already invented a "mammoth-like" mouse, as the evolutionary paleontologist Tori Herridge pointed out in a Bluesky thread. They are called fancy mice—first bred in the 1800s in Japan and later became the ancestors of modern lab mice. Some fancy mice are even hairier than the woolly mouse, and some fancy mice were already called "woolly." You might wonder, how is the woolly mouse a step in the direction of a woolly mammoth, but a fancy mouse is not? Another great question. It's not. As Herridge points out in her excellent thread—which is an in-depth analysis of the ways the woolly mouse fails to measure up to Colossal's claims—all the genetic edits Colossal made to their woolly mice were edits already known to produce hairy mice.
So what have we learned? A charming rodent can be one of the most powerful tools in a technosavior's pocket. As Nature reported, Colossal is now valued at $10 billion. And what has Colossal produced so far? A hairy mouse that kind of already exists, and a slew of press releases on plans to de-extinct not just mammoths, but also animals like dodos and thylacines. The announcement of the woolly mouse will no doubt rake in even more capital, which was presumably the point and which will probably benefit its investors more than it will a putative, chimerical mammoth. When a company trying to sell itself calls something a "breakthrough," you don't have to believe them.
Hier der erwähnte Bluesky-Thread von Tori Herridge zu den Wollmäusen.
Zitat Tori Herridge@toriherridge.bsky.social I am pretty sure these little dudes, pictured in the press-release and now all over the internet, are #512 & #517 -- mostly because all the other mice pictured in the pre-print are far less photogenetic (more on that in a moment). What do you think?
5. März 2025 um 00:39
How many genetic changes directly related to mammoth DNA do you think #512 & #517 -- poster mice for this "watershed moment in [Colossal's] de-extinction mission" -- have? Answer: ZERO. It's all the work of five well-known mouse knockouts already known to produce, well, woolly mice
17/n
Intriguingly those five genes (Fgf5, Fam83g, Fzd6, Mc1r, Fabp2) don't feature in the hit list for most-likely-to-be-mammothy genes in this paper co-authored by a few members of Colossal's advisory board. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... But they are GREAT choices if you want to make a woolly mouse. [though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant -- I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!] *MAMMOUSE KLAXON*
Colossal did another set of experiments, where they edited mouse embryonic stem cells.
Here they knocked out our old friends Fgf5 (long hair), Mc1r (blonde hair), & -- for one experiment -- Fabp2 (lipids 🐭💩) Fabp2 gets a special mention, as it looks like mammoths had an early stop codon. So I guess knocking it out it counts as mammoth-inspired, even if it isn't an edit that replicates the mammoth gene.
You can decide if I was unfair above.
Similarly they knocked out Tgfa (known to result in wavy hair in mice) >> this genes appears not to have functioned in the woolly mammoth, so they stopped it working in the mice too And they did a knock-in of Krt27 (which is linked to curly/textured hair in mice), altering the wild type amino acid at position 191 from isoleucine to valine. Most mammoths have a valine at amino acid position 191. Asian elephants have a methionine.
This is what a Tgfa, Krt27, Fgf5, Mc1r, mouse looked like. This is the mammothiest mouse of all of Colossal's mice experiments, genetically speaking. *drum roll*
I don't know why Colossal didn't use #571 in the press release... They also tweaked another keratin-linked gene Krt25, but I cannot see that there is a mammoth connection there (they don't specify and it doesn't appear even in the supp info of Díez-del-Molino et al.), and the effect was similar underwhelming. And Fabp2? There wasn't any affect on body mass, but they haven't replicated the experiments that showed sex-specific differences in weight gain on high-fat diets yet. They don't mention the 💩
So, do these mice tell us anything about mammoths? No. Except maybe don't bother using mammoth DNA if you want a woolly mouse.
But these mice do show us something important. They expose the workings of the PR machine, where the devil is in the detail & things are not always exactly what they seem. And that all you need to do to make 🐭 headline news, is to add a generous sprinkling of 🦣 (just not in the genome)
Zitat Tori Herridge @toriherridge.bsky.social·1Mo Once upon a time, in the late 1800s, people in Japan got really into breeding mice. Coloured mice. Patterned mice. Even mice that danced. They became known as Japanese Fancy Mice, and that caught the attention of researchers in Europe and America, who imported them for study. 2/n
These mice became ancestors of the lab mice still used today in scientific research -- the go-to model organising for understanding mammalian genetics and how we get from a bunch of genetic code to a living breathing animal pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23604024/
For example, pioneers like Abbie Lathrop develope inbred strains of mice from Japanese Fancy Mice. At least five of the primary strains of laboratory mice in use today may derive from a single female from Lathrop
Since then A LOT of work has been done using mice. Let me introduce you to some cool mouse genes...
Like Fgf5, a gene which codes for FGF5 protein. This protein seems to inhibit hair growth (in mice), so if you stop the gene from working, and stop FGF5 from being made, you get... long-haired mice! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7923352/
and Fam83g. The wly (that stands for woolly) mutation in mice is associated with defects in this gene. bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
Or Frzd6 aka Frizzled. This one affects the pattern of hair (think of hair whorls, like the crown of your head). Knock this one out in mice and you get mutants with disoriented, and sometimes tufty hair www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
And then there is Mc1r, which affects hair colour. Disrupt this gene and you get blonde mice www.frontiersin.org/journals/gen... Erm…
*switches amp back on*
So, where were we? Ah yes, well-known mouse mutations. Another corker: Fabp2. This beauty relates to the Intestinal Fatty Acid Binding Protein aka I-FABP or FABP2. It seems to have a role in fat metabolism, and if you stop it working mice poop more & more often 💩💩 See Lackey et al: journals.physiology.org/doi/prev/202...
Fgf5 (long hair!), Fam83g (woolly hair!), Fzd6 (tufty hair!), Mc1r (blonde hair!), Fabp2 (💩🐭!) -- stop these genes working in mice ("knock out") and what any mouse geneticist would expect to see is a mouse with long, woolly, tufty blonde hair, possibly do a poo or two.
Okay Tori, I hear you saying. Thanks for the genetics lesson. Do you have a point?
Well the genes I just mentioned have something in common. They are genes that were knocked out in these little cuties, 512 & 517 who hit the press today under their stage name THE COLOSSAL WOOLLY MOUSE The above image of mice #512 & #517 is from the pre-print that describes the multiplex gene editing experiments done by Colossal. You can read the pre-print here:
Abstract The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) possessed a thick woolly coat and other cold-adaptive traits that enabled survival in harsh Arctic environments. Current de-extinction efforts focus on genetically modifying the closely related Asian elephant to express woolly mammoth traits. In this study, we establish a multiplex-edited mouse model with modifications in genes associated with hair morphology and lipid metabolism, enabling insights into traits involved in developing woolly hair and cold tolerance. Our optimized workflows achieved high editing efficiencies and produced genetically modified mice with simultaneous editing of up to seven different genes. Selected modifications include loss-of-function mutations in Fgf5, Tgm3, and Fam83g, among others. The resulting mice display exaggerated hair phenotypes including curly, textured coats, and golden-brown hair. This study establishes a rapid platform for testing mammoth-centric genetic variants while advancing methods for complex genetic model generation. These approaches inform de-extinction efforts and research into the genetic basis of mammalian hair development and cold adaptation.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Aus der aktuellen Titelgeschichte des TIME Magazine:
Zitat It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.
The dire wolf genome analyzed to determine what those changes were was extracted from two ancient samples—one a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, the other a 72,000-year-old ear bone unearthed in American Falls, Idaho. The samples were lent by the museums that house them. The lab work that happened next was painstaking.
Cloning typically requires snipping a tissue sample from a donor animal and then isolating a single cell. The nucleus of that cell—which contains all of the animal’s DNA—is then extracted and inserted into an ovum whose own nucleus has been removed. That ovum is allowed to develop into an embryo and then implanted in a surrogate mother’s womb. The baby that results from that is an exact genetic duplicate of the original donor animal. This is the way the first cloned animal, Dolly, was created in 1996. Since then, pigs, cats, deer, horses, mice, goats, gray wolves, and more than 1,500 dogs have been cloned using the same technology.
Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.
Halten wir fest: bei den drei Wölfen, die durch die Veränderung von 14 Genen von Colossal Biosciences entstanden sind, handelt es sich NICHT um "Dire Wolves", sondern um normale Wölfe (Canis lupus), deren Knochenbau und Fellstruktur/dichte so verändert worden ist, wie sie aus Überresten von Aenocyon dirus erschlossen worden sind. Bis auf diese phänotypischen Ausprägungen (wie man sie auch von anderen Anpassungen an gleiche Umweltbediungen kennt, etwa im der Körperform von Delphinen und Ichthyosauriern; in der Bilogie spricht man von Homologie) handelt es sich schlicht um graue Wölfe. Die beiden Spezies gehören nicht zur gleichen Gattung. Um das per Beispiel am Stammbaum des Menschen zu verdeutlichen: Homo sapiens sapiens (unsere Wenigkeit) gehört zur Gattung Homo, die ältesten Vertreter sind Homo habilis und Homo rudolfensis, vor 2,5 bis 1,5 Millionen Jahren entstanden. NICHT dazu gehören die Australopithekinen und die anderen großen Menschenaffen.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Ad fontes: beim Blick in Musings and Meditations: Reflections on Science Fiction, Science, and Other Matters (Nonstop Press, 2011), in dem "Resurrecting the Quagga" nachgedruckt ist, stelle ich fest, daß sich Silverberg schon in seiner Kolumne "Pleistocene Park" vom September 2000 mit dem Thema befaßt hat, es also aus dieser Quelle so alt wie das laufende Jahrhundert ist. Damals ging es um die angedachten Pläne, aus den Zellen des Jarkow-Mammuts, 1997 in Sibirien gefunden, Zellen zu gewinnen, um per Leihmutterschaft mit einer Elefantenkuh ein Mammut zu klonieren.
In meiner Meldung zum Tod von Hans Magnus Enzensberger im November 2022 habe ich den Namen Ray Nayler erwähnt.
Zitat Es handelt sich, das haben ja sowohl HME wie Snow deutlich gemacht, nur einen kleinen, exemplarisch gewählten Teilbereich aus der Schnittfläche zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Kultur(betrieb). Ein weitgefaßterer Bereich ist in den letzten 20 Jahren das Thema der Bewußtseinsforschung, Hirnforschung, Neurophilosophie geworden; in der literarischen Befassung dann KI, Maschinenbewußtsein.
Wie es der Zufall will, platzt diese Todesnachricht gerade mitten in meine Lektüre der ersten Romans von Ray Nayler, "The Mountain in the Sea," Anfang Oktober erschienen, und der bislang einzige SF-Roman in diesem Jahr überhaupt, der bei den Rezensenten so etwas wie einen Aha!-Effekt ausgelöst hat mit dringendem Bedürfnis zum Weiterempfehlen (also dem, was man auf Englisch salopp "buzz" nennt); übrigens nicht nur bei den üblichen Verdächtigen; "Science" und "New Scientist" haben das Buch nachdrücklich empfohlen.
Und Naylers zweites Buch, ein Kurzroman (100 Seiten) "The Tusks of Extinction", im Januar 2024 bei Tordotcom erschienen, befaßt sich mit genau diesem Thema.
Zitat The human/octopus link in The Mountain in the Sea is thematically expanded upon in The Tusks of Extinction (2024), set decades after Homo sapiens has put paid to the last elephant; a Russian attempt to "de-extinct" the woolly mammoth is put at risk by organized poaching by ivory hunters; the mammoth point-of-view is powerfully rendered, in a sense, through the downloaded consciousness of a human whose mind had been in storage since the previous extinction.
Zitat The pulpish title implies melodrama, and the story’s present action certainly does involve violence, retribution, and wilderness adventure. More than a century from now, woolly mammoths have been recreated and set loose in a vast Siberian preserve, but they are still subject to covertly approved trophy-hunting by the obscenely wealthy and to absolutely illegal slaughter by ivory poachers. Nor are those the only threats they face: Since the resurrected animals did not initially have the survival skills that their predecessors developed and shared socially, they do not know how to be mammoths. The solution was to install in one mammoth matriarch the recorded memories and personality of Damira Khismatullina, a long-dead human specialist in elephant behavior and culture who could teach her herd the skills it needs to flourish on the tundra. But the threat of human predation remains, and the story shuttles between the actions and attitudes of mammoth-Damira and those who would kill members of her herd for their enormously valuable tusks.
Zitat The chapters are numbered in chronological order but appear based on a narrative order instead. For example, chapter one is chronologically the first event to happen in the storyline but is at the end of the book. Mammoth opens with the billionaire scientist Howard Christian, and his attempts to clone a mammoth, largely for the sake of the countless circuses he owns. His team finds a mammoth frozen in ice, along with two human beings, one of whom appears to be wearing a wristwatch. His assistant, Warburton, is initially convinced that this is a joke, but Howard takes the notion of time travel seriously, and hires physicist Matt Wright to study a metal briefcase which is presumably a time machine. Matt soon falls in love with Susan Morgan, the elephant keeper who is in charge of the mammoth project, who works in the same warehouse.
Solche Aus-der-Zeit gefallenen Artefakte, die dann letztendlich zur Erfindung einer Zeitmaschine führen, tauchen in dem Genre ja immer wieder mal als Auftakt-McGuffin auf, etwa in Wolfgang Jeschkes Der letzte Tag der Schöpfung (1980), in dem auf Gibraltar ein follisierter US-Jeep aus der Zeit der frühen Menschwerdung ausgegraben wird, Andreas Eschbachs Das Jesus-Video (1998) (eine in der Erzählgegenwart noch nicht entwickelte Videokamera in einem Grab aus der Römerzeit) oder Jack McDevitts Ancient Shores (1996), in dem am Rand des früheren Lake Agassiz in Dakota, der seit 8000 Jahren nicht mehr existiert, ein Boot mit einem Fiberglasrumpf zum Vorschein kommt.
Zitat Ausubel, Ramona
US teacher and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Safe Passage" in One Story for 10 April 2010, her best known story being "Atria" (4 April 2011 The New Yorker), whose protagonist, mysteriously impregnated, gives birth to a seal, and soon lovingly introduces her newborn child into its element. The tale was included in her first collection, A Guide to Being Born (coll 2013). In its sudden turns and absurdities, when taken literally, her shorter work explicitly shows signs of George Saunders. ... Her third novel, The Last Animal (2023), set in the very Near Future "Age of Extinction", takes some sustenance from "Atria" in its description of the impregnation of a female elephant with an embryo grown from a disinterred baby mammoth. The birth is successful; but the world beyond the animal park is increasingly diseased.
Zitat Harry Turtledove, a prolific, award-winning author best known for alternate history, pictures a slightly different version of England just prior to World War Two in “The Yorkshire Mammoth.” In this reality, glaciers still exist in the northernmost parts of Britain. Because of the colder climate, saber-toothed tigers and other Ice Age animals only went extinct in historic times. Mammoths, however, survive, and are even domesticated for use as farm animals. The narrator is a veterinarian who has to figure out a way to deal with a mammoth with a broken tusk.
Completely convincing in all its details, this is a charming story, light in tone without ever becoming comedic. It seems intended as a tribute to James Herriot, author of All Creatures Great and Small, which also deals with a veterinarian in Yorkshire. If so, it is more than worthy of its model.
Zitat von The Yorkshire Mammoth (Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2019)Down in the dales, the farmers were much like farmers anywhere else, even if they did expect a good deal in the way of value for their money. In the higher country, though, I wondered not only whether the Vikings had ever left but whether the Ice Age had ever abated. The cold winds blowing off the glaciers made me want to keep one eye peeled for cave bears, dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, or other relics of bygone days.
Such monsters, of course, had vanished from England and Wales and Scotland in Roman times, though they lingered in Ireland with the Irish elk and the aurochs until after the Norman conquest. Nor had anyone in Yorkshire set eyes on a woolly rhinoceros since the days of Queen Elizabeth, or those of James I at the very latest.
Mammoths, though, mammoths were a different story. Like mahouts in far-off India, the canny Yorkshiremen worked out that getting work from their enormous neighbors was more profitable than slaughtering them wholesale. And that long tradition lingered still in those days when I was new in Thrsk, especially on the highlands too rugged or rocky for tractors. Mammoths gave the veterinary trade around there a fillip it got in few other places outside the Far East.
Zitat Dire Wolves Have Just Been Brought Back From Extinction — and No This Isn’t Some ‘Game of Thrones’ Fantasy
In a stunning scientific development, the prehistoric canines made famous in the hit HBO show have been announced as the world’s first de-extinct animal.
Immortalized in Game of Thrones and on the crest of House Stark, the dire wolf is walking the Earth again and even howling after going extinct nearly 10,000 years ago.
In a twist that could only have been dreamed up by Hollywood, filmmaker Peter Jackson and Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin collaborated with Colossal Biosciences on today’s reveal of what the company is trumpeting as the first-ever de-extinction of an animal.
Colossal reached out to Martin after it started work on its dire wolf de-extinction project. Not only did he sign on as a Colossal Biosciences cultural adviser and investor, Martin also flew to meet Romulus and Remus at their private preserve (which Colossal says has been certified by the American Humane Society).
Says Martin, in a statement, “Many people view dire wolves as mythical creatures that only exist in a fantasy world, but in reality, they have a rich history of contributing to the American ecosystem.”
While many fans of Game of Thrones likely think that dire wolves as fantasy beasts, they are in fact an actual animal that lived in the Americas and likely went extinct due to the disappearance of the large herbivores on which they preyed. At L.A.’s famed La Brea Tar Pits, fossil remains from more than 3,600 dire wolves have been discovered and the adjacent museum devotes an entire wall to displaying around 400 dire wolf skulls.
The Grateful Dead, "Dire Wolf" vom Album Workingman's Dead (1970).
When I awoke, the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me Please, don't murder me
The Wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me Please, don't murder me Don't murder me
In the backwash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire The Dire Wolf collects his dues, while the boys sing 'round the fire
»Extinction«: Mord zwischen Mammuts Was passiert, wenn es eines Tages gelingt, ausgestorbene Tiere wiederzubeleben? Hoffentlich nicht das, was Douglas Preston in seinem spannenden Wissenschaftsthriller schildert.
Das Dinosaurierskelett auf dem Cover soll vielleicht Fans von »Jurassic Park« neugierig auf diesen Wissenschaftsthriller machen. Tatsächlich geht es Autor Douglas Preston hier aber gar nicht um wiederbelebte Urzeitreptilien, auch wenn die Grundidee des Buchs sehr ähnlich ist: Wissenschaftler lassen mit Hilfe von Gentechnik ausgestorbene Tiere wiederauferstehen und siedeln sie in einem Ferienresort an, in dem wohlhabende Besucherinnen und Besucher sie bestaunen können. Anstelle von T-Rex und anderen Sauriern sind es diesmal aber Mammuts, Riesenbiber und -hirsche, die per De-Extinction zurück ins Leben geholt werden.
Douglas Prestons Thriller liest sich auch für Wissenschaftsfans spannend. Mit De-Extinction greift der Autor ein aktuelles Thema auf. So arbeitet das US-amerikanische Unternehmen »Colossal Biosciences« um den Genetiker George Church daran, mammutähnliche Elefanten mit Hilfe der Genschere CRISPR zu erschaffen. Im Buch gelingt das dank eines genetisch modifizierten Elefantenembryos, der von einer Asiatischen Elefantin als »Leihmutter« ausgetragen wird. Church und seinem Team schwebt dagegen eine künstliche Gebärmutter vor, in der das Jungtier heranwachsen soll.
Zitat This future Mars is being partly terraformed, and so we have ‘naturals’, those born on Mars who are tall but fragile, and ‘Earthstrong’, those like January who have been born on Earth but who are a danger to the naturals as they don’t know their own strength in Mars’s 1/3 gravity. A few have invertedly killed or injured the natural Martians, and so the Earthstrongers when amongst natural Martians are made to wear a frame that limits their strength. ... Such a brief synopsis suggests an adventure novel, an updating of the sort of stories Heinlein was writing, but for a contemporary audience. To some extent The Mars House does this, for at times it is a social commentary, a romance, a planetary romance, and at times even a comedy of errors, something which has elements of Bradbury, Heinlein and even Kim Stanley Robinson in its make-up, and akin to say Greg Bear’s Moving Mars.
However, despite such ambitious and laudable aims, the author’s plot many conveniences and contrivances tended to bring me back to reality with a jump, just as I was starting to enjoy it. I’ll give some examples at the end should you wish to read them – there are others.*
To give some examples: SPOILERS! (You may want to skip this bit): Genetically modified mammoths set loose on the planet have a language that can be understood through a piece of technological flim-flam, a head-gizmo. This becomes important to the plot when, just by coincidence, the only people who can communicate with the mammoths are our hero and his companion, because his companion just so happens to have written a Mammoth’s Language Encyclopaedia. The coincidence is crushingly convenient.
THE MARS HOUSE by Natasha Pulley Published by Gollancz, March 2024
Noch zu "Nature" und dem Bericht über die Wollmäuse von Colossal Bioscience.
Zitat Nature 639, 284-285 (2025) NEWS 04 March 2025
"Meet the ‘woolly mouse’: why scientists doubt it’s a big step towards recreating mammoths" De-extinction company Colossal mixed mammoth and mouse mutations in a single strain to create a shaggy-haired rodent. By Ewen Callaway
A company that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to ‘de-extinct’ woolly mammoths and other animals has claimed a breakthrough in its quest: the creation of hairier mice. The gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ harbour a mix of mutations modelled on those of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), as well as changes known to alter hair growth in mice, Colossal Biosciences announced in a 4 March press release and accompanying preprint1. Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.
But some specialists in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago. “It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”
Shaggy-hair gene As part of its effort to engineer mammoth-like elephants, Colossal and its collaborators are working to find gene variants that contributed to key mammoth traits, such as shaggy hair, cold tolerance and extra fat stores. To do this, they compare genomes extracted from the remains of dozens of mammoths and from other living and extinct relatives of the creatures, in search of protein-altering changes that evolved on the mammoth lineage. To test the accuracy of these comparisons, a team led by Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, used gene editing to create mice with mutations similar — but in most cases not identical — to those found in mammoths. Shapiro says the group also tested several gene mutations known to affect the hair of mice but not found in mammoths. The researchers used different gene-editing tools to create mice with up to eight genetic alterations spread across seven genes. These mice tended to have long, shaggy hair that, owing to a mutation known to affect hair colour in mice, humans and mammoths, was tawny-toned instead of the usual dark grey. “Adorability was one of the unintended consequences that we did not expect,” Lamm says. Mice with a mammoth-inspired change to a gene involved in fat metabolism were no heavier than were mice with unedited genes. The mice are only a few months old, and the researchers have not had much time to investigate how the mutations might affect their long-term health, including their fertility and propensity to develop cancers. The researchers plan to test whether the mice are any better at handling the cold than other mice, and to study their hair development.
The mice are only a few months old, and the researchers have not had much time to investigate how the mutations might affect their long-term health, including their fertility and propensity to develop cancers. The researchers plan to test whether the mice are any better at handling the cold than other mice, and to study their hair development. Lamm says the company has no plans to breed or sell the mice commercially. But for about $3,500, scientists can purchase a shaggy-haired mouse strain known as ‘wooly’ from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, which first bred the mice more than two decades ago. Researchers later showed that the strain carries a mutation in a gene called Fam83g — one of the genes inactivated in Colossal’s woolly mice.
The gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ harbour a mix of mutations modelled on those of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), as well as changes known to alter hair growth in mice, Colossal Biosciences announced in a 4 March press release and accompanying preprint (1). Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.
But some specialists in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago. “It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”
Lamm says the company has no plans to breed or sell the mice commercially. But for about $3,500, scientists can purchase a shaggy-haired mouse strain known as ‘wooly’ from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, which first bred the mice more than two decades ago. Researchers later showed that the strain carries a mutation in a gene called Fam83g — one of the genes inactivated in Colossal’s woolly mice.
Showing that changes found in mammoth genomes can affect mouse biology is a useful proof of principle, says Alfred Roca, a population geneticist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, who sees the experiments as a step towards engineering elephants with mammoth traits. “It’s a very nice visualization of where you want to end up in the mammoth.”
Mammoth genomics Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Buffalo in New York, says it’s impossible to disentangle the effects of the mouse-specific mutations — some of which have been known for decades to alter hair growth — from the three changes informed by mammoth genomics. One of these, in a gene called Fabp2, is involved in fat metabolism, and the other two, in the genes Krt27 and Tgfa, are linked to hair structure. “I would love if it showed that mammoth-specific changes identified through genome comparisons do have real phenotypic consequences, but it doesn’t,” he says. Shapiro defends the decision to include mouse-specific mutations in Colossal’s woolly mice, in part because of the genetic chasm that separates mice and mammoths. “We have to choose modifications that are going to be compatible with healthy animals,” Shapiro says. “We’re not shoving mammoth genes into mice because there’s 200 million years of evolutionary distance between them.” It’s not clear how many genetic changes would be needed to imbue elephants with mammoth traits. Lamm says Colossal’s goal isn’t to create an exact replica of mammoths, but a creature that can fill the ecological niches that mammoths occupied. “It’s really about rebuilding extinct species for today and looking for lost biodiversity and lost genes that drive those phenotypes.” Making eight changes to an organism’s genome, as the Colossal team did, is now fairly standard in genetic engineering, Riesenberg says.
Riesenberg and his colleagues are developing methods to introduce dozens, or even hundreds, of Neanderthal-specific changes into human stem cells — to identify the biology that makes humans unique (“One cannot and should not recreate the Neanderthal,” he stresses). Altering an animal’s genome on this scale is one of the great frontiers in genome editing, Riesenberg adds. Even the capacity to make this many changes “would not bring you close to making a mammoth”.
Zitat Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures. By Ben Mezrich, George Church, Stewart Brand
"'Woolly' Breathes New Life Into A Scientific Saga" - July 5, 20177:00 AM ET
Ben Mezrich's new book, Woolly, is about science's attempt in recent years to use genetic engineering to revive the extinct woolly mammoth. But as with his previous bestselling works of narrative nonfiction — such as Bringing Down the House, the basis of the film 21, and The Accidental Billionaires, the basis of the film The Social Network — Woolly dwells on close-ups before zooming out to the big picture.
Their reasons, as Mezrich spells out, are more than academic. By pioneering the methods it would take to clone a mammoth and gestate the fetus successfully in the womb of an elephant, Church, Wu, and crew would open the door to further efforts to revive extinct species — and, through the impact these reintroduced species would have on the environment, to help reverse the damages that modern civilization has had on Earth's ecosystem and climate.
The Harvard group isn't the only one working toward this end. In Russia, the father-son team of Sergey and Nikita Zimov launch Pleistocene Park, a wildlife preserve on the steppes of Siberia, where the mammoth once freely roamed — and where they could possibly roam once more.
It all sounds very Jurassic Park, of course, and Mezrich doesn't hesitate to draw that parallel. The hubris of such scientific endeavors, as well as the ethical issues involved, crop up in Woolly, although it's clear the author's sympathies lie with his subjects. Anecdotes like the wedding of Church and Wu form the backbone of the book, rather than serving as ornament. Mezrich's eye for characterization is as sharp as his ability to break down scientific jargon into easily digestible chunks.
The true protagonists of Mezrich's saga, though, are the great mammoths themselves. Through his fluid use of close perspective, poetic license, and present-tense recreations of past events — not to mention his occasional speculation into the future — the author dramatically illustrates his tale. It's paced like a thriller, with the frustrating politics of the research industry bleeding over into the maneuverings of capitalists who see dollar signs in investing in widespread genetic engineering. Mezrich also frequently reconstructs dialogue between the plot's players, which at times feels overly contrived and distracting.
Zitat Will bringing back the woolly mammoth save humanity from itself?
A chat with author Ben Mezrich about bringing back long-extinct animals
Jul 27, 2017
Woolly is written like a novel, with a few chapters taking place in the future and past. The opening, for example, takes place from the perspective of a calf — the last of the woolly mammoths. This is typical of Mezrich’s style, which often includes composite characters. The book follows the life of George Church, the Harvard University geneticist who leads the effort to bring back extinct species by extracting mammoth DNA and combining it with the DNA of an Asian elephant. We learn about an important childhood trip Church took to the 1964 World’s Fair and how the famous academic almost flunked out of a graduate program because he didn’t do the coursework, even though he published important papers.
Church’s life is intertwined with that of other characters, like de-extinction proponent and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and the Russian father-and-son team of Sergei and Nikita Zimov. The Zimovs are trying to populate a place in the Siberian tundra they call Pleistocene Park with huge animals. The hope is that if the mammoth is brought back, and then brought to Pleistocene Park, it can help fight climate change.
So, how could resurrecting the woolly mammoth help us save the world?
That’s the crazy part of this story. The reason to make woolly mammoths is not just to make an amusement park full of them. They can actually do good. Permafrost is a giant ticking time bomb. The permafrost carries a lot of carbon dioxide [which contributes to global warming]. It’s slowly thawing and releasing it, and when it does release all the carbon dioxide, it’s going to be game over.
So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the ‘80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They’ve been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they’ll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder.
[The idea is that mammoth herds could graze and trample trees and help the area become grassland again, as it was before we overhunted the animals. That would slow the thaw.]
Zitat In March 2015, Church and his genetics research team at Harvard successfully copied some woolly mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant. Using the CRISPR DNA editing technique, his group spliced genetic segments from frozen mammoth specimens, including genes from the ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair attributes, into the DNA of skin cells from a modern elephant. National Geographic, in an article titled "Mammoth-elephant hybrids could be created within the decade. Should they be?", reported,
"Church's dreams of engineering a hybrid mammoth first deepened after an interview he did with the New York Times in 2008 about efforts to sequence the woolly mammoth genome."
On September 13, 2021, Church founded a biosciences and genetics company, Colossal Biosciences, with entrepreneur Ben Lamm. The company is attempting to use genetic code to revive the woolly mammoth by equipping Asian elephants with mammoth traits.[84][85]
“It's like they always say, you look down for one week to breed a woolly mammoth and when you look up again your little girls have turned into women.” Deadpan gems like this sparkle in just about every scene of Ausubel’s fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction, which marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss. … As the novel opens, a year later, their mom has dragged them to Siberia, where scientists are searching for woolly mammoth bones in service of a theory that bringing back certain extinct species could help reverse climate change. (It makes sense but, unsurprisingly, cannot be summarized in this space.) Bored and fed up, the girls go off for a wander and come back with the frozen, perfectly preserved body of a baby woolly mammoth. Immediately the men on the expedition name it Aleksei and move to claim credit. Back home in Berkeley, their mom meets an eccentric millionaire named Helen who owns a castle and a wild animal preserve on Lake Como in Italy, and the two hatch a plan to take back the wheel on woolly mammoth resurrection.
Zitat Each animal, the company says, has 20 genetic changes across 14 genes designed to make them larger, change their facial features, and give them a snow-white appearance.
Some scientists reject the company’s claim that the new animals are a revival of the extinct creatures, since in reality dire wolves and gray wolves are different species separated by a few million of years of evolution and several million letters of DNA. “I would say such an animal is not a dire wolf and it’s not correct to say dire wolves have been brought back from extinction. It’s a modified gray wolf,” says Anders Bergström, a professor at the University of East Anglia who specializes in the evolution of canines. “Twenty changes is not nearly enough. But it could get you a strange-looking gray wolf.” Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient DNA who is now on a three-year sabbatical from the University of California, Santa Cruz, as the company’s CSO, acknowledged in an interview that other scientists would bristle at the claim. “What we’re going to have here is a philosophical argument about whether we should call it a dire wolf or call it something else,” Shapiro said. Asked point blank to call the animal a dire wolf, she hesitated but then did so. “It is a dire wolf,” she said. “I feel like I say that, and then all of my taxonomist friends will be like, ‘Okay, I’m done with her.’ But it’s not a gray wolf. It doesn’t look like a gray wolf.”
Colossal was founded in 2021 after founder Ben Lamm, a software entrepreneur, visited the Harvard geneticist George Church and learned about a far-out and still mostly theoretical project to re-create woolly mammoths. The idea is to release herds of them in cold regions, like Siberia, and restore an ecological balance that keeps greenhouse gases trapped in the permafrost. Lamm has unexpectedly been able to raise more than $400 million from investors to back the plan, and Forbes reported that he is now a multibillionaire, at least on paper, thanks to the $10 billion value assigned to the startup. As Lamm showed he could raise money for Colossal’s ideas, it soon expanded beyond its effort to modify elephants. It publicly announced a bid to re-create the thylacine, a marsupial predator hunted to extinction, and then, in 2023, it started planning to resurrect the dodo bird—the effort that brought Shapiro to the company.
So far, none of those signature projects have actually resulted in a live animal with ancient genes.
Each faces dire practical issues. With elephants, it was that their pregnancies last two years, longer than those in any other species. Testing out mammoth designs would be impossibly slow. With the dodo bird, it was that no one has ever figured out how to genetically modify the pigeon, the most closely related species from which to craft a dodo via editing. One of Lamm’s other favorite targets—the Steller’s sea cow, which disappeared around 1770—has no obvious surrogate of any kind. But creating a wolf was feasible. Over 1,500 dogs had been cloned, primarily by one company in South Koea. Researchers in Asia had even used dog eggs and dog mothers to produce both coyote and wolf clones. That’s not surprising, since all these species are closely enough related to interbreed. “Just thinking about surrogacy for the dire wolf … it was like ‘Oh, yeah,’” recalls Shapiro. “Surrogacy there would be really straightforward.” Dire wolves did present some new problems. One was the lack of any clear ecological purpose in reviving animals that disappeared during the Pleistocene epoch and are usually portrayed as ferocious predators with slavering jaws. “People have weird feelings about things that, you know, may or may not eat people or livestock,” Shapiro says.
The technical challenge was there was still no accurate DNA sequence of a dire wolf. A 2021 effort to obtain DNA from old bones had yielded only a tiny amount, not enough to accurately decode the genome in detail. And without a detailed gene map, Colossal wouldn’t be able see what genetic differences they would need to install in gray wolves, the species they intended to alter. Shapiro says she went back to museums, including the Idaho Museum of Natural History, and eventually got permission to cut off more bone from a 72,0000-year-old skull that’s on display there. She also got a tooth from a 13,000-year-old skull held in another museum. which she drilled into herself. This time the bones yielded far more DNA and a much more complete gene map. A paper describing the detailed sequence is being submitted for publication; its authors include George R.R. Martin, the fantasy author whose books were turned into the HBO series Game of Thrones, and in which dire wolves appear as the characters’ magical companions. In addition to placing dire wolves more firmly in the Canidae family tree (they’re slightly closer to jackals than to gray wolves, but more than 99.9% identical to both at a genetic level) and determining when dire wolves split from the pack (about 4 to 5 million years ago), the team also located around 80 genes where dire wolves seemed to be most different. If you wanted to turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf, this would be the obvious list to start from.
Colossal then began the process of using base editing, an updated form of the CRISPR gene-modification technique, to introduce some of those exact DNA variations into blood cells of a gray wolf kept in its labs. Each additional edit, the company hoped, would make the eventual animal a little more dire-wolf-like, even it involved changing just a single letter of a gene. Shapiro says all the edits using information from the ancient dire wolf were made to “genetic enhancers,” bits of DNA that help control how strongly certain genes are expressed. These can influence how big animals grow, as well as affecting the shape of their ears, faces, and skulls. This tactic was not as dramatic as intervening right in the middle of a gene, which would change what protein is made. But it was less risky—more like turning knobs on an unfamiliar radio than cutting wires and replacing circuits. That left the scientists to engineer into the animals what would become their showstopper trait—the dramatic white fur. Shapiro says the genome code indicated that dire wolves might have had light coats. But the specific pigment genes involved are linked to a risk of albinism, deafness, and blindness, and they didn’t want sick wolves.
That’s when Colossal opted for a shortcut. Instead of reproducing precise DNA variants seen in dire wolves, they disabled two genes entirely. In dogs and other species, the absence of those genes is known to produce light fur. The decision to make the wolves white did result in dramatic photos of the animals. “It’s the most striking thing about them,” says Mairin Balisi, paleontologist who studies dire wolf fossils. But she doubts it reflects what the animals actually looked like: “A white coat might make sense if you are in a snowy landscape, but one of the places where dire wolves were most abundant was around Los Angeles and the tar pits, and it was not a snowy landscape even in the Ice Age. If you look at mammals in this region today, they are not white. I am just confused by the declaration that dire wolves are back.” Bergström also says he doesn’t think the edits add up to a dire wolf. “I doubt that 20 changes are enough to turn a gray wolf to a dire wolf. You’d probably need hundreds or thousands of changes—no one really knows,” he says. “This is one of those unsolved questions in biology. People argue [about] the extent to which many small differences make a species distinct, versus a small number of big-effect differences. Nobody knows, but I lean to the ‘many small differences’ view.”
Zitat Idaho Museum of Natural History 20. August 2021
My what big teeth you have! Have you heard the news? New research this year on the #DireWolf, including this specimen from our collections, show that Dire Wolves were not true wolves at all! 🚫🐺Instead, they are a group of canins unrelated to the modern North Amercian #wolf 🐺 #fox 🦊 #coyote or #dog 🐶! Ancient DNA🧬 extracted from this skull, and four others from across North America, helped scientists unravel this mystery and goes to show why museum collections are so important! Specimen IMNH 48001/52, courtesy of Bureau of Reclamation
Hier zu dem Fundort des 13.000 Jahre alten Wolfszahn aus Ohio:
Zitat Wyandot County Ohio is playing a part in the de-extinction of the Dire Wolf. The researchers at Colossal Biosciences extracted and sequenced the genomes of dire wolves from a 13,000-year-old tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio and a 72,000-year-old skull from Idaho.
Colossal extracted ancient DNA from two dire wolf fossils: a tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, that is around 13,000 years old, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, around 72,000 years old. The team deeply sequenced the extracted DNA and used Colossal’s novel approach to iteratively assemble high quality ancient genomes, resulting in a 3.4-fold coverage genome from the tooth and 12.8-fold coverage genome from the inner ear bone. Together, this data provided more than 500x more coverage of the dire wolf genome than was available previously.
Analyses of the dire wolf genome allowed Colossal to identify the key variants in dire wolves that are not found in other canids that tell the story of dire wolf evolution. For example, Colossal identified multiple genes undergoing positive selection that are linked to dire wolf skeletal, muscular, circulatory, and sensory adaptation. The team discovered dire wolf specific variants in essential pigmentation genes revealing that dire wolves had a white coat color – a fact that is impossible to glean from fossil remains alone. The team also identified dire wolf specific variants in regulatory regions that alter the expression of genes. From this list, Colossal used its proprietary computational pipeline and software to select 20 gene edits across 14 distinct loci as targets for dire wolf de-extinction, focusing on the core traits that made dire wolves unique including size, musculature, hair color, hair texture, hair length, and coat patterning.
Based on Colossal’s genomic analysis, the team used gray wolves – the closest living relative of dire wolves – as the donor species for establishing cell lines. Using Colossal’s novel approach to establish cell lines from a standard blood draw, the team collected blood during a normal veterinary procedure and established cell lines from blood epithelial progenitor cells (EPCs). The team then performed multiplex genome editing of these cells followed by whole genome sequencing to confirm editing efficiency and identify any alterations to the genome arising during extended cell culture. The Colossal dire wolf team selected high quality cells with normal karyotypes for cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer into donor oocytes, followed by short-term culture to confirm cleavage. Healthy developing embryos were then transferred into surrogates for interspecies gestation. Three pregnancies led to births of the first de-extinct species.
Colossal edited 15 extinct dire wolf variants into the donor gray wolf genome, creating dire wolves that express genes that have not been expressed for more than 10,000 years. These target genes were selected because each is linked to one or more key traits that made dire wolves unique among canids. For example, Colossal targeted CORIN, a serine protease that is expressed in hair follicles and suppresses the agouti pathway, impacting coat color and patterning. The dire wolf CORIN variants impact pigmentation in a way that leads to a light coat color.
Colossal also edited dire wolf specific variants in a multi-gene regulatory module that has been linked to variation in body size as well as ear, skull, and facial morphology. The region encodes eight genes that establish species-specific constraints in skeletal size and structure, and has been linked to features including differences in human height and the diverse beak shapes among finch species. One gene encoded by this module – HMGA2 – is directly associated with body size in dogs and wolves. Another gene in this module – MSRB3 – has been linked to variation in ear and skull shape among canines and other mammals. Given the role of these genes in establishing species-specific size and morphology, the dire wolf team edited dire wolf-specific variants into gene enhancers (DNA sequences make it more likely that the gene will be transcribed into RNA) in this genomic region.
For each high impact variant identified as linked to a target phenotype, Colossal’s dire wolf team created a detailed profile of all potential impacts on a donor gray wolf genome. To ensure healthy outcomes, the team discarded variants that would incur some risk outside of the predicted phenotype or prioritized variants already evolved in gray wolves with the predicted phenotype. For example, Colossal edited the protein coding region of LCORL, a transcription factor that regulates gene expression by influencing whether a gene is transcribed. Variations in LCORL have been linked to variation in body size in many species, including humans, horses, and canids. The dire wolf has three changes to the LCORL protein sequence that are predicted via 3D modeling to alter the way the protein folds precisely at the location where LCORL should bind to a major gene silencing complex known as the PRC2 domain. Interestingly, large dog breeds (which are domesticated gray wolves) have a variant of LCORL that is missing the PRC2 domain entirely. As the dire wolf version is predicted to have a similar phenotypic impact as the variant found in larger dog breeds, and because of the potential for LCORL to interact with other genes in the gray wolf genetic background that are not edited, Colossal’s dire wolves express the protein that is found in the largest grey wolves. This choice allows for the predicted phenotypic impact and without any additional risk.
The dire wolf genome has protein-coding substitutions in three essential pigmentation genes: OCA2, SLC45A2, and MITF, which directly impact the function and development of melanocytes. While these variants would have led to a light coat in dire wolves, variation in these genes in gray wolves can lead to deafness and blindness. The team therefore engineered a light colored coat in Colossal’s dire wolves via a path known to be safe in gray wolves: by inducing loss-of-function to MC1R and MFSD12. These genes influence expression of pigments eumelanin (black) and pheomelanin (red) in melanocytes that deposit to the coat, achieving the lighter pigmented coat color phenotype suggested by the dire wolf genome but without any potential health impacts.
Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) were distributed across the American midcontinent during the Pleistocene ice ages. The oldest confirmed dire wolf fossil, from Black Hills, SD, is around 250,000 years old. Colossal’s genomic data indicate, however, that the lineage first appeared during the Late Pliocene, between 3.5 and 2.5 million years ago, as a consequence of admixture between two more ancient (and now extinct) canid lineages. Dire wolves were as much as 25% larger than gray wolves and had a slightly wider head, light thick fur and stronger jaw. As hyper-carnivores, their diet comprised at least 70% meat from mostly horses and bison. Dire wolves went extinct at the end of the most recent ice age, around 13,000 years ago.
Zitat The Sheridan Cave Pit Fossil Site in Wyandot County, Ohio
The owner of the Indian Trail Caverns tourist site in Wyandot County, Ohio decided to dig through a shallow depression near the cave where on weekends he allows people to visit for a few dollars admission. He hoped to find a passage that led to his cave. Instead, his digging uncovered a former sinkhole trap that had developed when rainwater dissolved through Paleozoic-aged limestone bedrock during the late Pleistocene. The sinkhole cave had since filled with sediment, but his excavation uncovered the bones of the Pleistocene-aged animals that had fallen into the cave. Gregory Macdonald of Cincinnati University took over and supervised the excavation from 1990-1995. After human artifacts were found, Ken Tankersley, an archeologist, became the excavator-in-chief.
Map of Ohio highlighting Wyandot County
Location of Wyandot County, Ohio.
The most common fossils in the cave were those of flat-headed peccaries, an extinct species well adapted to living in arid, sandy grasslands. They lived in herds. At least 43 individuals became trapped in the cave. By contrast, only 1 long-nosed peccary, an animal that likely preferred forest edge, fell in the sinkhole. Fossils of other ungulate species found in the sinkhole include the extinct stag-moose (Cervalces scotti), caribou, and white tail deer. Two species of bear died in the cave–the extinct giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) and a black bear. Fossils of some of the species of smaller animals that lived here at the end of the Ice Age were from species that no longer occur this far south: pygmy shrews, yellow-cheeked voles, heather voles, pine martens, and fishers, though the latter may have survived here till the time of European colonization. Red squirrels prefer boreal forests and used to range here as well but presently do not. The extant species of beaver and the extinct giant beaver (Casteroides ohioensis) lived in this area then. Raccoons, striped skunks, weasels, woodchucks, chipmunks, gray squirrels, porcupines, and rabbits are part of the present day fauna that also lived here during the late Pleistocene. Bones of turkey, channel catfish, and bullheads were probably brought into the cave by avian predators. As I noted in an essay last week, I hypothesize bullhead catfish were the most common fish living in southeastern North America during the coldest phases of the Ice Age, and that may have been true in the midwest too.
Several human artifacts were discovered by paleontologists searching through the vertebrate fossils. A stone arrowhead and scraper were identified as being from a late Clovis culture. Two bone spearpoints were also found, and a hole found in a fossil peccary shoulder blade perfectly matches the spearpoints. One of the points appears as if it had impact damage from striking the bone. Some of the fossil bones are burned–either by humans or in a forest fire. Remains of a butchered snapping turtle suggest humans enjoyed a chelonian snack at this site.
Radio-carbon dating of charcoal indicates calender year dates of 12,600 BP-13,000 BP. Burned bones give ages about 1000 years older than that.
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #13This future Mars is being partly terraformed ... Genetically modified mammoths set loose on the planet
Apropos: Mammute auf dem Mars kommen bei Stephen Baxter auch schon vor, in "Icebones" (2001), dem 3. Teil der Mammoth-Trilogie ("Silverhair" und "Longtusk" sind 1999 erschienen & behandeln das Überleben einer Herde intelligenter Mammute in Sibirien seit dem Ende der letzten Eiszeit); die gesamte Trilogie ist unter dem Titel "Behemoth" vor einem Jahr bei Gollancz/Orion als 800 S. starker Band neuaufgelegt worden.
Zitat Final installment of Baxter’s trilogy (it previously appeared in Britain) featuring intelligent mammoths—although, unaccountably, the publishers released the first two volumes here in the wrong order (Silverhair, 1999; Longtusk, 2001). It is now the fourth millennium. The mammoth Icebones, daughter of Silverhair, wakes from prolonged suspended animation—on top of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mars! Moreover, she’s at once surrounded by bewildered mammoths who, fed and nurtured by humans, have no idea how to survive now that the humans have gone. Mammoths have innate language skills, so at least the small, squat Icebones can talk with her tall, spindly, Mars-born cousins. Icebones, with her hard-won survival skills, must become Matriarch, and weld the confused group into a herd. But there’s no food and little water on the mountain, and it seems that, briefly warm and wet, Mars is already cooling and dying. The mammoths might survive in Hellas basin, the deepest crater on the planet. And so they begin an epic journey across half the globe: down the enormous mountain, past huge frozen seas, through the vast canyon of the Valles Marineris, battling thirst, cold, starvation, predators, and even each other—not all the mammoths accept Icebones’s leadership. And even if the herd attains its goal, it’s far from certain that mammoths can survive if the planet continues to cool.
Impossible not to cheer for Baxter’s plucky pachyderms: a saga that, even at its most improbable, engages the reader’s heart and mind.
Aus dem, was ich weiter oben zitiert habe, geht ja hervor, daß die Veränderungen, die per CRISPR im Genom der Grauwölfe (und der Wollmäuse) vorgenommen worden sind, zum einen die Physiognomie betrreffen (stämmiger/gedrungen), zum anderen die Felldichte, - länge und -färbung. Und daß es nicht um eine "echte" genetische Rekonstruktion der ausgestorbenen Art geht. Zwergelefanten gab es auf vielen Mittelmeerinseln, Malta etwa und Zypern (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes, ca. 250 kg schwer, die gefundenen Knochen werden auf 7500 v.Chr. datiert). Das Kreta-Zwergmammut war die kleinste bekannte Art und erreichte eine Schulterhöhe von 1,10 m bei einem Gewicht von ca. 300 kg. Die genetischen Mechanismen, die einer solchen Inselverzwergung zugrunde liegen, dürfte entweder schon erforscht oder anhand zahlreicher Beispiele in Tierreich gut zu ermitteln sein. Insofern würde ich da ad hoc erst einmal nichts ausschließen.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Daß der Fund solcher Schädel Anlaß zur Entstehung der Sagen über die Zyklopen gewesen sein könnten. hat der Wiener Paläontologe Othenio Abel 1914 in seinem Buch "Die Tiere der Vorzeit" gemutmaßt; nach Lage der Dinge läßt sich das nicht belegen, klingt aber ziemlich plausibel. Der deutsche Raketenpionier und Spezialist für zoologische Ausgefranstheiten Willy Ley hat die These in seinem Buch The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn. An Excursion into Romantic Zoology (Viking Press, 1948) bekanntgemacht. Am weitesten hat sich damit die amerikanische Althistorikerin Adrienne Mayor mit ihrem Buch "The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times" (2000; die zweite revidierte Ausgabe hat den Untertitel "Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times"), in dem sie versucht, so gut wie alle griechischen Sagengestalten wie etwa die Greife und Zentauren auf solche Fehldeutungen zurückzuführen.
Zitat New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link 6/24/2024 A new academic paper is challenging folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s identification of the dinosaur Protoceratops as the inspiration for the legendary griffin of mythology. Mayor’s claim, first made more than thirty years ago and most famously outlined in her turn-of-the-century book The First Fossil Hunters, posits that Central Asian merchants observed the exposed bones of Protoceratops, some with their nests, and passed these tales on. As they traveled westward, the creature turned into a winged lion with an eagle’s head, resembling the beaked skull of the Protoceratops.
However, paleontologists Mark Witton and Richard Hing of the University of Portsmouth concluded that Mayor’s argument is little more than speculation, outlining a number of reasons that Protoceratops is unlikely to be the inspiration for the griffin. Many of their arguments are convincing, but some of their claims are seemingly erroneous (Protoceratops is not a horned dinosaur, for example).
At root, Witton and Hing argue that Mayor has exceeded the evidence by drawing conclusions that are neither necessary nor supported by paleontological nor Classical facts. They point out that no evidence of Protoeceratops bones being used as griffin bones exists from the ancient world, nor are the dinosaurs associated on the ground with key elements of griffin mythology, such as guarding gold. Further, images of griffin-like monsters exist in Mycenaean art (c. 1200 BCE), centuries before direct Greek contact with merchants from Central Asia. The authors correctly note that dinosaur bones are unnecessary to explain the creation of a legendary animal combining features from two known animals, eagles and lions, both of whom, as symbols of royalty and power, were appropriate legendary guardians for gold.
“The whole idea is conjecture and speculation,” Witton told The Guardian.
Witton and Hing identify a key inconsistency in Mayor’s argument, notably that, when speaking to popular audiences, as in the children’s book The Griffin and the Dinosaur, she often presents Protoceratops as “inspiring” the griffin myth, but in her academic work she writes instead that the bones merely enhanced a preexisting body of griffin lore, which they say originated in Greece. This is no small point. Throughout The First Fossil Hunters, Mayor fluctuates between ascribing every aspect of the griffin to a Protoceratops inspiration and recognizing that the lion-eagle combo existed thousands of years efore contact with Central Asia. (The Egyptians also had eagle-headed, lion-bodied sphinxes.) It simply can’t be both.
The earliest griffin lore, given in Herodotus 3.116 and 4.27, is said to come from Aristeas, a seventh-century traveler cited elsewhere in Herodotus, and thus the authors argue that Aristeas misunderstood stories of gold-guarding creatures such as the roc told to him by the Issedones of Central Asia and misidentified them as (Greek) griffins. (The Persian-Arabian roc myth probably postdates this period.) Herodotus says he made use of Aristeas (4.16) to compile his summary and that Aristeas had mentioned gold-guarding griffins (4.13), but it is not entirely clear whether he was the only source for the stories told by the Issedones, as Herodotus also claims Scythian sources for some of his Issedonian information. (Two direct quotations from Aristeas exist, but neither the one in John Tzetzes [Chiliades 687-692] nor Longinus [On the Sublime, ch. 10] mentions griffins. It is assumed that the mention of griffins in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 790ff. derives from Aristeas, but this is only an inference based on reading the text against Herodotus.) ... Mayor raises one important point that Witton and Hing did not counter: While other mythological creatures exist in what seems to be a fantastical time of gods and monsters before the Trojan War, the griffin is described as though it were a real animal, much like the manticore (tiger) and rhinoceros. She correctly concludes that the griffin can’t be a purely mythological creature like harpies or Pegasus. On the other hand, in those days, as Ctesias attests, all manner of weird creatures were presented as real, such as his story of men with long tails and other oddities whose stories still appeared in European and Arabian lore into the Middle Ages. Most of these fantastic creatures, treated as real, were stories acquired from other cultures, either distorted from life or adapted from foreign myths.
Und hier - Science 308:796-8 (6 May 2005) - die Hypothese über das "Verhindern der globalen Erwärmung" durch Mammute, oder vergleichbare Herbivorenhorden: "Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth’s Ecosystem," Sergey A. Zimov.
Zitat The most important phase of the program will be the reintroduction of bison from Canada and subsequently, when the herbivores are sufficiently abundant, the acclimatization of Siberian tigers. In many regions of the Amur River basin, where this formidable predator survives, January temperature is as low as −25° to −30°C. The tigers’ survival there is limited more by poaching and herbivore density than by climate. Scientifically, Pleistocene Park is important because it directly tests the role of large herbivores in creating and maintaining grassland ecosystems, something that can only be surmised but not proven from the paleorecord.
There is more than just scientific discovery at stake here. Northern Siberia will influence the character of global climate change. If greenhouse gas–induced warming continues, the permafrost will melt. At present, the frozen soils lock up a vast store of organic carbon. With an average carbon content of 2.5%, the soil of the mammoth ecosystem harbors about 500 gigatons of carbon, 2.5 times that of all rainforests combined. Moreover, this carbon is the relatively labile product of plant roots that were incorporated from productive steppe vegetation during the Pleistocene. As soon as the ice melts and the soil thaws, microbes will begin converting this long-sequestered soil carbon into carbon dioxide under aerobic conditions or into methane under anaerobic conditions. The release of these gases will only exacerbate and accelerate the greenhouse effect.
Preventing this scenario from happening could be facilitated by restoring Pleistocene-like conditions in which grasses and their root systems stabilize the soil. The albedo — or ability to reflect incoming sunlight sky - ward—of such ecosystems is high, so warming from solar radiation also is reduced. And with lots of herbivores present, much of the wintertime snow would be trampled, exposing the ground to colder temperatures that prevent ice from melting. All of this suggests that reconstructed grassland ecosystems, such as the ones we are working on in Pleistocene Park, could prevent permafrost from thawing and thereby mitigate some negative consequences of climate warming.
Einer der immer wieder genannten Einwände gegen den "Nachbau" der Dire Wolves/Schattenwölfe ob nun "bis ins Mark" oder nur in effigie im Kielwasser der Medienmeldungen war, daß sich die Ökosysteme seit dem Ende der Eiszeit ja verändert hätten und somit für diese Spezies im Hier + Jetzt "kein Platz mehr sei", sie gewissermaßen ohne passende ökologische Nische dastünden. Jetzt müßte man nur noch eruieren, ob es da um die gleichen Bedenkenträger handelt, die gegen jegliches Bejagen der handelsüblichen Wölfe, Canis lupus, votieren, die sich bei uns, in den Niederlanden, Frankreich und weiter nördlich zur Landplage entwickeln, weil "deren Vorkommen ja nur natürlich sei."
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
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