animals & plants & fungi @leaf-thief - Tumblr Blog

deer, but with droopy puppy dog ears lmao

found at the Srebarna Biosphere Reserve Natural History Museum, Srebarna, Bulgaria

#leaf-thief oc #zoology #ecology #biology #bulgaria #nature #deer #crappy taxidermy #museum #natural history museum #srebarna #morphology #taxidermy

sixth-extinction

Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered the first dire wolf to live in over 10,000 years. Here's what that means for other extinct s

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.

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.

These sound more like transgenic wolves to me than true dire wolves, but it’s super interesting nonetheless.

leaf-thief

This is a catastrophe for conservation biology.

First off, these are just weird dogs. Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) are a completely different genome and just changing the expression of some genes that they thought would make it look like a dire wolf (its literally that superficial) accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Second, the are talking about reintroductions?? Even if they were actually genetically true dire wolves, which they're not, they're just dogs, where would they put them?? Where are these thousand-year-extinct animals' natural habitat that is missing them so? Their niche doesn't exist anymore, their environment or their habitat.

These animals are nothing more than a product to attract investors and are bringing up an extremely dangerous rhetoric.

What these types of projects are doing is diverting funding and efforts away from actual conservation of TODAY's struggling species. Creating a rhetoric where if a species that goes extinct can somehow be brought back reduces the value of the lives of the currently living organisms that are so desperately battling anthopogenic impacts. We don't need "de-extinction", we need conservation biology and sustainability.

#leaf-thief oc #zoology #ecology #biology #dire wolf #de-extinction #colossal