Tag Archives: “dire

This is today's edition of The Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire? For several years now, Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences has been in the news for its plans to re-create woolly mammoths someday. But now it’s making a bold new claim—that it has actually “de-extincted” an animal called the dire wolf. Dire wolves were large, big-jawed members of the canine family. More than 400 of their skulls have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in California. Ultimately they were replaced by smaller relatives like the gray wolf. In its effort to re-create the animal, Colossal says, it extracted DNA information from dire wolf bones and used...