Colossal Biosciences said it cloned red wolves. Is it for real?
If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Forty miles to the west, the industrial sprawl of Houston spawned a golden glow. Tanner Broussard’s old Toyota Tacoma bumped over the levee-top roads as killdeer, flushed from their rest, flew across the beams of his headlights. Broussard peered into the darkness, looking for traps. “I have one over here,” he said, slowing slightly. A master’s student at McNeese State University, he was quiet and contemplative, his bearded face half-hidden under a black ball cap. “Nothing on it,” he said, blandly. The truck rolled on. Wolves and their relations—dogs, jackals, coyotes, and so on—are classed in the family Canidae, and the canid that dominated this landscape in eastern Texas was once the red wolf. But as soon as white settlers arrived on the continent, Canis rufus found itself under siege. The war on wolves “lasted 200 years,” federal researchers once put it, in a surprisingly evocative report. “The wolf lost.” By 1980, the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild, its population reduced to a small captive breeding population. Still, for decades afterward, people noted that strange wolflike creatures persisted along the Gulf Coast. Finally, in 2018, scientists confirmed that some local coyotes were more than coyotes: They were taller, long-legged, their coats shaded with hints of cinnamon. These animals contained relict red wolf genes. They became known as the ghost wolves. Broussard grew up in southwest Louisiana, watching coyotes trot across his parents’ ranch. The thrilling fact that these might have been not just coyotes but something more? That reset a rambling academic career. In 2023, Broussard had recently returned to college after a seven-year pause, and his budding obsession with wolves narrowed his focus. Before he finished his bachelor’s degree, he began to supply field data to a prominent conservation nonprofit. The American red wolf, Canis rufus, is the most endangered wolf species in the world. This pup is one of four animals said to be clones of this native North American species.COURTESY OF COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES Then, last year, just before he began his master’s studies, he woke to disconcerting news. A startup called Colossal Biosciences claimed to have resuscitated the dire wolf, a large canid that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. Pundits debated the utility of the project and whether the clones—technically, gray wolves with some genetic tweaks—could really be called dire wolves. But what mattered to Broussard was Colossal’s simultaneous announcement that it had cloned four red wolves. “That surprised pretty much everybody in the wolf community,” Broussard said as we toured the wildlife refuge where he’d set his traps. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums runs a program that sustains red wolves through captive breeding; its leadership had no idea a cloning project was underway. Nor did ecologist Joey Hinton, one of Broussard’s advisors, who had trapped the canids Colossal used to source the DNA for its clones. Some of Hinton’s former partners were collaborating with the company, but he didn’t know that clones were on the table. There was already disagreement among scientists about the entire idea of de-extinction. Now Colossal had made these mystery clones, whose location was kept secret. Even the purpose of the clones was murky to some scientists; just how they might restore red wolf populations was unclear. Red wolves had always been a contentious species, hard for scientists to pin down. The red wolf research community was already marked by the inevitable interpersonal tensions of a small and passionate group. Now Colossal’s clones became one more lightning rod. Perhaps the most curious question, though, was whether the company had cloned red wolves at all. You can think of the red wolf as the wolf of the East—an apex predator that once roamed the forests and grasslands and marshes everywhere from Texas to Illinois to New York. Smaller than a gray wolf (though a good bit larger than a coyote), this was a sleek beast, with, according to one old field guide, a “cunning fox-like appearance”: long body, long legs; clearly built to run across long distances. Its coat was smooth and flat and came in many colors: a reddish tone that comes out in the right light, yes, but also, despite the name, white and gray and, in certain regions and populations, an ominous all black. We know these details thanks to a few notes from early naturalists. As writer Andrew Moore writes in his new book, The Beasts of the East, by the time a mammalogist decided to class these eastern wolves as a standalone species in the 1930s, the red wolf had been extirpated from the East Coast and was rapidly dwindling across its range. Working with remnant skulls and other specimens, the mammalogist chose the name red wolf—which was later enshrined with the Latinate Canis rufus—because that’s what these wolves were called in the last place they survived. The looming extinction of the red wolf turned out to be a good thing for coyotes. Canis latrans is a distant relative of wolves that split away from a common ancestor thousands of years ago and might be considered, as one canid biologist put it to me, the “wolf of the Anthropocene.” Their smaller size means they need less food and can survive in smaller and more fragmented territory, the kind that modern humans tend to build. The last red wolves, which lived in Louisiana and Texas, decided a strange and smaller mate was preferable to no mate at all. Red wolves had kept coyotes out of eastern America, outcompeting them for prey. Now, as the wolves declined, the coyotes began to slip in. The last red wolves, which lived in Louisiana and Texas, decided a strange and smaller mate was preferable to no mate at all. Soon the territory became a genetic jumble, home to both
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