Ep. 711: So Are Dire Wolves Back From The Dead Or Not?

Summary

Episode Summary: Ep. 711: So Are Dire Wolves Back From The Dead Or Not?

Release Date: June 2, 2025
Podcast: The MeatEater Podcast
Host: Steven Rinella
Guests: Phil (Co-host), Dr. Randall, Angela Perry, Matt James (Colossal Biosciences)

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Introduction to the Dire Wolf Project

The episode delves into Colossal Biosciences' ambitious project to resurrect dire wolves, exploring the scientific, ethical, and ecological implications of bringing an extinct species back to life. Matt James from Colossal Biosciences leads the discussion, providing insights into the genetic engineering and conservation efforts involved.

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Personal Anecdotes and Initial Discussions [00:00 - 05:08]

The conversation begins with light-hearted banter among the hosts, sharing personal stories and introducing themselves. Phil recounts a memorable moment during his graduation, setting a casual tone for the episode.

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Dire Wolves and Pop Culture Influence [06:11 - 07:10]

Phil introduces the topic of dire wolves, referencing their portrayal in Game of Thrones and the widespread media coverage surrounding Colossal Biosciences' dire wolf project. He humorously notes the sensational headlines like "Scientists Revive Dire Wolves," highlighting the public's fascination.

Phil [07:11]: "If you did learn about that there was such a thing once upon a time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which was a misleading portrayal, then you might have caught headlines... Scientists say they have resurrected the direwolf."

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Scientific Breakdown of the Dire Wolf Resurrection [29:48 - 45:24]

Matt James explains the genetic similarities between gray wolves and dire wolves, emphasizing the 99.5% genetic similarity. He discusses the challenges of accurately reconstructing dire wolf genetics and the careful selection of gene edits to avoid health issues like deafness or blindness.

Matt James [37:00]: "Humans have 60% genetic similarity with a carrot. So in this world, little differences get different."

The team utilized advanced sequencing techniques to achieve 13X coverage, ensuring a robust genetic dataset. Colossal chose specific gene edits from related species to safely confer desired traits without unintended side effects.

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Birth and Rearing of the First Dire Wolf Pups [50:07 - 57:09]

Steven Rinella shares the meticulous process of birthing and raising the first dire wolf pups. Due to uncertainties in gestation and development rates, they opted for cesarean sections to ensure healthy births. The pups were hand-reared to prevent human imprinting, maintaining their wild instincts.

Steve Rinella [51:29]: "We tried to avoid this 100% thing because that's really cloning. We're not creating the identical individual we sequenced."

The pups, Romulus and Remus, are now approaching adulthood, exhibiting natural behaviors such as howling and displaying flight distances that indicate strong wild instincts.

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Ethical and Ecological Considerations [62:18 - 84:27]

The discussion pivots to the ethical implications of de-extinction. Phil raises concerns about potential ecological impacts and genetic contamination with existing species. Matt James counters by emphasizing the controlled environments and biosecurity measures in place to prevent negative interactions.

Steve Rinella [63:42]: "Our why is really built more around... a proof of principle need that we could show how this would work."

The team highlights their collaboration with indigenous groups, particularly the Mandan and Arikara tribes, who express interest in reintroducing dire wolves to their lands, honoring ancestral stories and enhancing conservation efforts.

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Regulatory Challenges and Public Perception [87:00 - 110:25]

Steven Rinella addresses the regulatory hurdles faced by de-extinction projects. He criticizes media misrepresentation and underscores the importance of habitat restoration alongside genetic efforts. The conversation touches on historical conservation successes and failures, advocating for a balanced approach that integrates new technologies while respecting ecological dynamics.

Steve Rinella [90:13]: "The pendulum swung all the way where now it's, you know, any change is bad."

Phil draws parallels with other conservation projects like black-footed ferret recovery, emphasizing the potential benefits and risks of introducing genetically edited species into the wild.

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Future Prospects and Conclusion [111:10 - End]

The episode concludes with a forward-looking perspective. Colossal Biosciences is expanding its conservation projects beyond dire wolves, including efforts to protect the American red wolf and developing technologies for habitat restoration and disease resistance in endangered species.

Steve Rinella [116:30]: "We have 45 of these projects ongoing. ... These are not a distraction of resources from places where you would normally give money to WWF."

Phil reflects on the broader impact of de-extinction on public awareness and conservation funding, acknowledging both the controversies and the educational value of such projects.

Phil [130:27]: "It's a pot stirrer, dude. But it made everybody smarter."

Key Takeaways

• Genetic Similarity: Dire wolves are 99.5% genetically similar to gray wolves, with careful gene editing to ensure health and viability.
• Controlled Rearing: The pups are raised in secure environments to maintain wild instincts and prevent human imprinting.
• Ethical Considerations: De-extinction projects must balance scientific advancement with ecological responsibility and ethical stewardship.
• Regulatory Hurdles: Navigating governmental regulations and public perception is crucial for the success of reintroduction efforts.
• Conservation Integration: De-extinction serves as a tool to enhance broader conservation initiatives, providing additional resources and awareness.

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Notable Quotes

• Phil [07:11]: "If you did learn about that there was such a thing once upon a time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which was a misleading portrayal, then you might have caught headlines... Scientists say they have resurrected the direwolf."

• Matt James [37:00]: "Humans have 60% genetic similarity with a carrot. So in this world, little differences get different."

• Steve Rinella [51:29]: "We tried to avoid this 100% thing because that's really cloning. We're not creating the identical individual we sequenced."

• Steve Rinella [63:42]: "Our why is really built more around... a proof of principle need that we could show how this would work."

• Steve Rinella [87:00]: "The pendulum swung all the way where now it's, you know, any change is bad."

• Phil [130:27]: "It's a pot stirrer, dude. But it made everybody smarter."

---

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the dire wolf resurrection project, blending scientific insights with ethical discussions and highlighting the potential role of de-extinction in modern conservation efforts.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

This is an I heart podcast.

[Dan Flores]

Steve Rinella here. The American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the west, unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west. And he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history. And I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores On Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way.

[Dr. Randall]

Foreign.

[Phil]

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Steve Rinella]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

[Phil]

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer.

[Dan Flores]

Stands, or scouting for elk, First Light.

[Phil]

Has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com F I R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com all right, everybody. Hot damn. This first episode is Dr. Anella.

[Dr. Randall]

Oh, you stole the. Okay, Phil, cue up the music. I was. You weren't supposed to introduce yourself that way. It was gonna be a surprise.

[Phil]

My daughter teased my ears with that hat on.

[Matt James]

Oh.

[Phil]

Do you know you can tell by the hat what you got going on? Yeah, like lesser people with the square hat. They don't. They're not. They don't have that hat.

[Angela Perry]

Notice that you got an octagon going there.

[Phil]

You get a different.

[Dr. Randall]

We're looking at you. Get a video taken photo of Steve with his diploma.

[Phil]

Hey, man, you guys just straight back.

[Matt James]

Is there a tier above that? And of other hats?

[Phil]

No, I think that's the top hat.

[Matt James]

Okay. It's like Pope after that.

[Phil]

I don't know that they make a better hat than that.

[Angela Perry]

Where'd you put that diploma?

[Phil]

Well, that's just a, you know, little inside baseball here.

[Angela Perry]

It's just a mock.

[Phil]

That's a prop.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah.

[Phil]

My actual diploma. My actual diploma is a big framed thing and you can imagine that it'll be right over your head. Probably right Here is the time of my life down there.

[Matt James]

Does the tassel go on a certain side?

[Phil]

It's pinned. Oh, it's pinned in place.

[Matt James]

Okay.

[Phil]

A couple things. You guys think it's all like. You guys think it's all gravy having that happen to you. Well, I'll tell you something you might not realize. Whoa.

[Matt James]

Is you hardships.

[Phil]

So you go up, you. You go up. It's in the. It's in the arena, you know, like hundreds, like 650 students, all their parents, you march up and the seat they give you is right by the. Right in the line of action. And it's televised. Okay.

[Dr. Randall]

Totally new concept.

[Phil]

So you stand up and you get what they call hooded, which you can't really see in that picture because it's all going on behind. Your hood's all going on behind you. They give you that, you give up and you give your speech. And I gave a speech called there's no Plan B. Then you sit down and then they have to hand 650 diplomas. But you're on. The camera is aimed in such a.

[Angela Perry]

Way that you're there not doing anything.

[Phil]

They warn you. Don't fiddle around.

[Matt James]

Don't pick your nose.

[Phil]

Don't look at your phone.

[Dr. Randall]

I fell asleep during my graduation. There's a picture of me sleeping.

[Phil]

I was wide awake because you had to sit there for all those people.

[Angela Perry]

How long that take? A couple hours. Yeah.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Matt James]

So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony.

[Phil]

They split the schools.

[Matt James]

Which one were you?

[Phil]

I was in the morning.

[Matt James]

Is that one more prime time?

[Phil]

I don't think that anybody looks at it that way. They split the schools. So mine, my honorary doctorate was from the School of Forestry Conservation.

[Matt James]

Okay.

[Phil]

So that school, all the foresters were coming up, which is like a stressful time to be coming out of a forestry program right now. Because that was like, you know, so many of those kids that come out of that forestry program going to land management agencies. It's stressful.

[Angela Perry]

Doctorate in an area outside of your. Your area of expertise.

[Phil]

Yeah, well, like, technically, like, I think the forestry part. But the School of Forestry and Conservation covers a lot of areas that are of relevance. In fact, I went and had a. I went and. And did like a Q A with the forestry students who have a lot of considerations around conservation funding and other issues.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah, you've got some.

[Phil]

So I don't think they mean that I'm like, as good as Seth as telling what trees are what.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Phil]

Seth was in forestry school. There's a test where you have to identify a hundred and some trees by the budget. Not the leaf, a stick.

[Angela Perry]

Bet you Doug Dern could do that.

[Phil]

Yeah, he's pretty good. Today we're doing a podcast on something hardly anyone know about except for people who listen to this show. This is old subject for people listening to this show, but other than that, everybody found out about him from Game of Thrones, Dire wolves. This is our current estimates. This to be our second and a half episode on this subject.

[Dr. Randall]

Yeah, because we had a first one.

[Phil]

We had a first one which was episode 466, which was called Dire Wolves and Ancient hunting Dogs, which was with Dr. Angela Perry. That was number one.

[Dr. Randall]

And then our half one.

[Phil]

Half one.

[Dr. Randall]

Touching on it with today's guest.

[Phil]

With today's guest, Matt James from Colossal Biosciences, we touched on Direwolf. So there's 1.5. At the conclusion of today's episode, the count will be up to 2.5.

[Steve Rinella]

If you.

[Phil]

If you did learn about that there was such a thing once upon a time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which was a misleading portrayal, then you might have caught headlines such as everywhere. A headline every. Everywhere on the planet you could possibly have a headline. Scientists say they have resurrected the direwolf. The return of the dire wolf. The dire wolf is back. Scientists revived the direwolf or something else. Massive amounts of coverage everywhere about Colossal Biosciences Dire wolf project. So today we're going to dig into all kinds of questions around that, including the big one. Why? Why would you do that? What exactly are they? And is it in fact, like, how do you make it relevant to conservation? But first, the news. Here's my news item. We already covered my. My heightened level of everything. Just my ascendancy. Certainly a framing coming home from my ascendancy. We drive all the way home, and I'm pulling into my, you know, like, not my driveway, but our circle.

[Dr. Randall]

Yep.

[Phil]

Where our house is off. And I see a crow. Like, we pull in, and up ahead of me, I see a crow, like, regurgitate what I take to be a synthetic item. Baby blue, like a babe. And I'm like. And I already tell my kids, like, what is that thing doing? And all of a sudden, he's. He, like, deposits out of his mouth two robin eggs that he carried at the same time, just standing in the road. And he, like, spits two robin eggs out. He starts pecking at one and pulls out a little robin, undeveloped robin. By this point, my younger boy and my daughter are out of the Truck heading toward the crow, which leaves its whole project in the road and flies off. My older boy is now heading to. He's like, making plans to kill the crow in retaliation. But my daughter gets there, and she comes back to the truck, and in her hand is a little writhing, featherless pink robin.

[Matt James]

Wow.

[Phil]

And in the other hand is an egg with a little crack.

[Dr. Randall]

I know where this is going.

[Phil]

Well, I make my older boy dispatch the. I make him kill the one that isn't going to survive.

[Matt James]

Would you use his boot or what?

[Phil]

His fingers.

[Matt James]

Okay.

[Phil]

Then my daughter goes around everywhere trying to find a robin nest to put the egg in. And I'm telling you, it won't work. It's cracked. And she's getting upset and more upset and can't find a nest. I said, but I want to return to what I was telling you. It'll never live. It's cracked. So it now is living in our. It's buried in our garden.

[Dr. Randall]

Oh, I thought it was going to.

[Phil]

I was like, it's nutrients will return to the earth.

[Dr. Randall]

Oh, I thought this was like, you're going to put it under like a pet pigeon, Raise up a roc.

[Phil]

She was. She was. She's like, I know it's expensive, but we need to get it. I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked. Like, there's nothing you're gonna do.

[Dr. Randall]

You're gonna put some tape on it.

[Phil]

So it's returning to the earth. In fact, it's gonna turn into raspberries. No, it's actually where it's positioned. It will be acorn squash.

[Angela Perry]

We've got a ramen nest up under our porch right now, and I'm just waiting. You know how those babies, they can't. They'll come out of the nest, but they can't really fly real well when that happens. The dog's gonna eat them.

[Phil]

Weeks are like, this is just gonna happen.

[Angela Perry]

Well, yeah. I mean, what am I gonna do? Move the whole nest?

[Phil]

No, it wouldn't be smart.

[Angela Perry]

No.

[Phil]

You know what was one of the more interesting things we've had on the show over the years is, you know, the myth that if you, like, go.

[Angela Perry]

Near the egg, it'll abandon it, touch them or something.

[Phil]

Do you remember when we had, you know, the whole thing? If you touch a fawn.

[Dr. Randall]

Right, right.

[Phil]

Remember we had Randall Kaufman and Matt from Keith or Monteith? He's like, well, that's true. None of our collaring projects would ever work out where we, like, net them, handle them, and then they stand up and go back with Their mom, you know. But I was raised to.

[Matt James]

It's good assumption to operate under.

[Phil]

That's what I was telling my daughter too. She says, well, she won't take care of it anyway. And I'm like, that's a myth. But they tell you that so you don't mess with stuff, but it's not true. It's just they're manipulating you into not. They're manipulating you into not messing with things you shouldn't mess with. Two book thing news is one for. For those of you awaiting it, our guide to wilderness skills and survival is out in Japanese.

[Dr. Randall]

How many other languages?

[Phil]

Don't know? I'm not sure of any other language.

[Angela Perry]

I don't think any other.

[Phil]

So they usually buy. When they buy it, it'll get. It'll go to like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. This is the only translation I'm aware of.

[Dr. Randall]

Huh.

[Phil]

But you being, you know, Japanese adjacent, you know, here we go. Significantly Chinese. Perhaps you can help me with something.

[Dr. Randall]

Yep. There are. There are some kanji. There's. There's.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Dr. Randall]

There are some script characters that are similar. But I long, long forgot how in.

[Phil]

China do they read books backwards or forwards?

[Dr. Randall]

So traditionally it's compared to us backwards.

[Angela Perry]

And it's not backwards up.

[Dr. Randall]

Right. It's not backwards to them. And it's.

[Phil]

Let's be frank.

[Dr. Randall]

And it's up.

[Phil]

I'm looking at this from American perspective.

[Dr. Randall]

Going right to left, if I'm not mistaken. Right. I think that's what it is traditionally.

[Phil]

Okay, that's interesting. You already kind of answered my question. Traditionally, because I have a Japanese fish cleaning book, which is my favorite book of all the books I've ever owned. It's like process descriptions on how to clean all kinds of fish.

[Dr. Randall]

That's so cool.

[Phil]

But if you read it the right way, the American way, the fish get put back together. So you're like, this is a book about resurrecting fish, but you're Rosie needs.

[Dr. Randall]

For that little baby ramen.

[Phil]

But you're supposed to go back to what would be for us, back to front.

[Dr. Randall]

Right.

[Phil]

So when I picked this up, I expected it to be that they would have reversed it. But they.

[Dr. Randall]

Because it's more modern now, I don't.

[Phil]

Think they print any book anyway. So you might. If you lived in Japan, you might grab a book and you might encounter a book that is read from.

[Dr. Randall]

Yeah.

[Phil]

From our perspective. Back to front. Or you might pick up a book that's read front to back and it would just be like, whatever you're adaptable either way.

[Dr. Randall]

I think more. I think books that are printed these days are just done in the. I don't know if I mean Western orientation. Yeah.

[Phil]

Me and Dr. Randall were trying to find the translator online. We found her LinkedIn. Oh, I couldn't read, being in Japanese, just in Japanese. I just wanted to get her impressions. I wanted to get her impressions.

[Matt James]

I thought that was a bootleg copy when I saw it.

[Angela Perry]

It's interesting how they put a dust jacket on a paperback.

[Matt James]

I thought that, too. I also thought this version was prettier than.

[Angela Perry]

Oh, yeah, that's a gorgeous cover.

[Matt James]

Yeah. Why didn't the American one look like.

[Dr. Randall]

I think that's a very Japanese.

[Phil]

Because Americans aren't that. Americans aren't that discreet as well.

[Dr. Randall]

Like, the. The Japanese have this wonderful art at packaging things up. So if you. If you go there and you buy, I don't know, cookies, there's a problem because there's a ton of waste. But individual cookies have their own wrapping, and then these wrapped, individual cookies are in a wrapped box, maybe with wrapping paper around it as, you know, presentation as a reflection of respect and of. And so it's.

[Phil]

Matt Cooks gets excited about all that. He's like, it's three times the packaging season.

[Angela Perry]

International business.

[Phil]

Yeah, I feel so. Three times.

[Dr. Randall]

That's right. That's right. I mean, they have a huge, like, plastic waste problem in Japan, but I'm not surprised that there is a cover on a softbound book.

[Phil]

Another paper. Oh, I, you know, I had a joke I liked a lot when I put that Japanese book on Instagram and I said, if this book would have come out in 1940, we'd still be fighting in the Pacific.

[Dr. Randall]

That was pretty funny.

[Phil]

You get it?

[Dr. Randall]

That's pretty funny.

[Phil]

This catch our. Our kids book, Catch Crayfish Count Stars, is out in paperback.

[Angela Perry]

Yep.

[Phil]

So I was saying, if you had a kid that you don't like enough for a hardcover or who's not well behaved enough to deserve a hardcover, or.

[Angela Perry]

If you have a kid that trashed the hardcover, now there's a softco.

[Phil]

Every kid in America should deserve a soft cover. Two. There's no kids that are that bad.

[Matt James]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Number one New York Times bestseller. This book, Catch Crayfish Count stars fun project skills and adventures for outdoor kids. So if you want to raise outdoor, competent children who understand, as Doug Duran puts it, life and death on the farm or life and death on the asphalt with bird eggs, this is a. This is a phenomenal book to get your kid involved with. It's just Projects. It's things they do and ways to engage with them with discussions about ecology and biology and everything outdoors.

[Angela Perry]

Yep. May 27th.

[Phil]

The goal being if you see a mouse and you say to your kid, grab that.

[Angela Perry]

It'll grab it and then ideally turn it loose.

[Phil]

Well, I mean just the fact that they'll.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah.

[Phil]

You know, that's why I like my kids. You tell them to grab a mouse, they're probably gonna grab it. It's doing a lot of outdoor stuff.

[Angela Perry]

Spiders.

[Phil]

We have an arachnophobia problem. But I've accepted that it's true. It's.

[Angela Perry]

It's not just.

[Phil]

I think it's a psychological like, I think it's a legitimate psychological thing. The arachnophobia. How this is harrowing. In Florida. A 61 year old woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida. They went over, they passed over an 11 foot alligator.

[Steve Rinella]

It's.

[Phil]

It seems like it's spooked and does the noise of it spooking in shallow water flipped the canoe and then decided to. And then killed the woman. Tiger Creek near Lake Kissimmee, south of Orlando. How harrowing.

[Angela Perry]

Be a rough way to go. I think be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly bear.

[Phil]

Her husband. How heroin for her husband. Oh, way worse than getting killed by a grizzly bear. There's just not a lot of romance in it.

[Angela Perry]

No, no. Hopefully drown first, I guess.

[Phil]

Go. Yeah. Just.

[Angela Perry]

The question is, is, are more people getting killed by alligators these days than and days past?

[Phil]

Well, here's the real question. You're right. But there's a way to arrive at that that I like. I can't remember who introduced this idea. Oh, I think it was a podcast guest. Remember we had Adam Pankratz on the.

[Dr. Randall]

Show like reporting and what we.

[Phil]

Well there's, there's, there's so like, so grizzly bears dust off like that's, that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a person or two every year in Montana. Right. So you'd look and be like as grizzly bears have recovered and hit recovery objectives and there's like more bears at higher populations. You'd be like are bears more likely to kill a person? Be like, well let's look at what an individual's bear, an individual bears chance of having a violent encounter with a.

[Dr. Randall]

Human or a run in with a human to begin with. And you look at human populations.

[Phil]

Yeah but the thing, but what I'm getting at is like a bear today, a grizzly today in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, a grizzly Today it an individual bear is not. That bear is not more likely to maul a person.

[Angela Perry]

No.

[Phil]

It's not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them. Yep. So I, I if you went point me if you went looked at Florida like you know, alligators were in had endangered species protections in the 70s.

[Angela Perry]

They sure were now.

[Phil]

Now they got like 1.5 million.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah. I mean they're living in Florida golf course ponds and canals in people's backyards.

[Phil]

So I don't. Yeah. It's not like gators are like, like individual gators are like man, I wouldn't have before but now I'm gonna bite a person. It's just like there's you know. So it might even be that an alligator and individual alligator still has a 000 whatever percent chance of doing it. And an individual alligators not like more likely to attack a person. But you just have more opportunities. But still it'd be like what a couple people. I don't know how many people get attacked every year in Florida. Couple die. We've talked about a bunch that died but I mean what is it like five, six people per year? That's easy. In March get bit in Florida. How many people get bit in Florida by an alligator divided by a million.

[Dr. Randall]

I think Spencer is checking up on that. But in March the same area where this woman got was was killed. Another woman was killed.

[Phil]

Really?

[Dr. Randall]

Yeah. In March.

[Angela Perry]

Did that one have something to do with a dog rescuing a dog or something?

[Phil]

Oh yeah.

[Angela Perry]

Or something about a dog because.

[Phil]

Yeah. 1800 grizzly bears in the lower 48. 1800 grizzly bears kill a couple people a year.

[Matt James]

Mm.

[Phil]

So in. So they're more dangerous per bear than gators. If you have a thousand gators.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah.

[Phil]

But the other thing is you got tons of dinky gators that you can't really count. You have to start counting them at a certain size, I guess.

[Matt James]

Since 1948, there have been 450 documented alligator bites in Florida. 30 of them were fatal.

[Dr. Randall]

Hmm.

[Matt James]

So it's a 80 years 7 year span.

[Dr. Randall]

I think we should finally get you on a gator hunt for an episode.

[Phil]

Yeah, you know I'd like to. I just never had. Not that I don't want to. There's a lot of stuff to do in this life. There's a lot of stuff to do in this life.

[Dr. Randall]

The gator nuggets are really good.

[Phil]

I've eat. Yeah. I've had friends give me sacks of gator meat. I just have never like planned it. You know what I mean this got us thinking about this. Do you know that there used to be so crazy an 11,000 pound alligator?

[Angela Perry]

And it used to be not like 10 years ago, like 10 million years ago.

[Phil]

70, 80 million years ago.

[Angela Perry]

Gotcha.

[Dr. Randall]

Like colossal. Probably doesn't want to work on this.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that one's a little too old for us. It's old.

[Phil]

Six to eight foot long teeth.

[Dr. Randall]

Wait a minute, six to eight inch long?

[Phil]

What am I saying?

[Steve Rinella]

That would be.

[Angela Perry]

That's how my kids, that's how my.

[Phil]

Older kid would report. But do you maybe mean inches? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Six to eight inch teeth. There's a picture of one eaten. There's like a, like a fanciful painting.

[Dr. Randall]

Of obviously an artist rendering.

[Phil]

Oh yeah. But it's like it's not an actual photo.

[Steve Rinella]

Right one.

[Dr. Randall]

Right. Not a polaroid one.

[Phil]

Grabbing a T. Rex, which I love.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Do you know what I mean? But you can't rule out an 11,000pounder. They found the bones from one in North Carolina in the 1850s.

[Angela Perry]

How long?

[Phil]

I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean that's a alligator the size of an orca cow.

[Dr. Randall]

I.

[Phil]

Can you imagine sitting there with your kid and they're nudging up to the edge of the pond and this head.

[Angela Perry]

Would be the size of this table.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh yeah.

[Phil]

Geez, you'd be able to see him from so far away. That's the thing I think about with dinosaurs is like, what's that big ass dinosaur, the big plant eater?

[Steve Rinella]

Brachiosaurus. Yeah.

[Phil]

If you're driving down the road, you'd be like, hey look, five miles away, there's one. Do you know what I mean? It'd be so obvious.

[Dr. Randall]

All right.

[Phil]

Quick. How many other news items we got?

[Dr. Randall]

Just this.

[Matt James]

No, there's 35ft in length. Is that gator?

[Steve Rinella]

That's even bigger than an orca.

[Phil]

This is an interesting deal because we, we had a wildlife. We had a retired u. S. Fish and wildlife service agent on the show not long ago talking about the smuggling of wildlife parts. And there's this is reported that there has been a post Covid decline in the smuggling of pangolin scales and elephant ivory related to a Chinese encyclopedia of medicine. Having said, perhaps there is no health benefit to pangolin scales.

[Dr. Randall]

I love it.

[Phil]

And ivory.

[Angela Perry]

Well, how is the ivory tied to medicine?

[Phil]

I don't know.

[Matt James]

And I feel like the black market is always operated outside of what traditional medicine would say is useful for curing or, or doing something. So I, I can't believe that like they're Attributing this to an official journal saying, hey, pangolins don't help your libido whatever.

[Phil]

In 2019, smugglers crime syndicates were shipping vast quantities of the two products from Africa into China. Says trafficking fell during the pandemic. Has remained low. Law enforcement efforts have helped. Falling prices have helped. And it goes on to say another possible factor is that in 2020, pangolin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine.

[Angela Perry]

We found out why.

[Dr. Randall]

Ivory, quote, ivory can purge the body of toxins and enhance the complexion.

[Phil]

Sure.

[Angela Perry]

Now, do you just like rub a piece of ivory on your face or do you grind it up?

[Dr. Randall]

I think you grind it and eat it. You know, obviously not backed by science, but that's the.

[Phil]

My wife was getting all of her toxins out last week. She did a cleanse. No, I was like, what toxins specifically? No one's ever able to know. The same way anybody answers it, they don't know. Yeah, like what? Tell me what toxins are coming out of you.

[Dr. Randall]

Pfas, which we can't get out of us.

[Dan Flores]

Steve Rinella here. The American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores On Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way.

[Phil]

I had a social media hissy fit one when the Trump administration canceled some federal spending on the lamprey problem in the Great Lakes, which I thought was a huge mistake and perhaps quite expensive in the long run. And better news, they're following through now with trying to keep big head carp, silver carp, the Asiatic carp species, out of the Great Lakes. And in fact, what surprised me is they've now working with Michigan's governor, Jennifer Whitmer. Whitmer, the administration is fast tracking a barrier system to keep carp going through the Chicago Canal and into the Great Lakes. There's often. There's also been a big argument among ecologists and fisheries people is, would those carp even like the Great Lakes anyways? Do I mean, current thinking.

[Angela Perry]

The only way to figure that out is let them get in there.

[Phil]

Right.

[Angela Perry]

Like what? You don't. I mean, that could be devastating to the Great Lakes.

[Phil]

The current thinking is they would. Because some people said that, well, they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is that they would like it and that it would be devastating.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, well, the problem with carp is they seem to like almost everybody at water they've ever been in.

[Phil]

I like everything.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah.

[Phil]

All right, we're going to do a little background on direwolves here.

[Matt James]

You mentioned Game of Thrones twice earlier. Have you seen Game of Thrones?

[Phil]

Never. I'm aware of it.

[Matt James]

Okay.

[Phil]

Have you?

[Matt James]

Yes, but I wanted your review on it.

[Phil]

Never watched it.

[Matt James]

Okay.

[Dr. Randall]

Like it?

[Phil]

I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like it.

[Dr. Randall]

Didn't you watch Narcos? Oh, wait, what? I do you Narcos and then what's that?

[Phil]

But that's. That's.

[Dr. Randall]

Wasn't there a Danish serial drama?

[Phil]

Well, Pusher one, Pusher two and Pusher three.

[Angela Perry]

I'm not into like fantasy stuff other than Star Wars.

[Phil]

I'm a little bit of a star. I'm a Star wars guy. A little bit of a Star wars guy. I don't watch serial dramas because I don't. With the exception of. What did you just name that? I did watch.

[Dr. Randall]

Was there like a Danish drama? Oh, and Narcos?

[Phil]

No, no, there's no date yet. Okay, drop Narcos. Yes, that's it.

[Dr. Randall]

Oh, there's another one. Pusher one, Pusher two and Pusher three or something. An Italian. An Italian series. I did watch that or something. Yeah.

[Phil]

No, Gamora.

[Dr. Randall]

Gamora.

[Phil]

Well, because Gamora was a book. Was a non fiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came a film called Gamora, which was a devastating film about the Italian mafia. And then out of that. So I watched because I was liking Gamora the book. Gamora the movie. I watched some of Gamora the series. What I. Not that it matters. What I don't like about serial dramas is after a while I want to get on with my life.

[Dr. Randall]

Did you watch Breaking Bad?

[Matt James]

Can I ask you?

[Phil]

Of course not.

[Matt James]

I've got the top five here. See if you've seen any of these.

[Phil]

Top five what?

[Matt James]

TV dramas of all time from the University of Pennsylvania, The Sopranos.

[Phil]

No.

[Matt James]

The Wire?

[Phil]

No. Breaking Bad?

[Matt James]

Mad Men?

[Phil]

No.

[Matt James]

Game of Thrones?

[Phil]

No.

[Matt James]

Okay, fine. I trust you, though.

[Phil]

I'm not hacking on it. I just can't. I need to move on. Like, I can't give, you know, me, movies I could have watched in that amount of time, and then I could start. Here's the other problem I have, and I don't want to take up too much of our time here. I can start to smell the writers keeping it going the minute I get a whiff of them keeping it going.

[Angela Perry]

Get an extra season or two.

[Phil]

Yeah. Like, oh, brother. You know, you can just smell them keeping it.

[Matt James]

Jump the shark.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, the good news about Game of Thrones is it wasn't that they were struggling to keep it going, is they were struggling to condense it into what they did.

[Phil]

Oh.

[Steve Rinella]

Because the books are just so prolific.

[Phil]

The books kept it going for them.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Phil]

Oh. Interesting thing here. Just about wolves in general. So the two dire wolves we're going to discuss today are Romulus. Were named Romulus and Remus, which are fitting for wolf names because Romulus killed his brother. Was that part of your thinking?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we were hoping.

[Phil]

Did they do fratricide? No, but, I mean, wolves are hip to fratricide.

[Steve Rinella]

They are. Yeah, exactly. It was fitting. Plus the, you know, race by a she wolf.

[Phil]

There's a statue in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, of Romulus and Remus suckling from the mothers. The wolf's teats. Yep.

[Dr. Randall]

Do we feel like rolling pictures for the video audience? Put a picture up on the little.

[Phil]

The two.

[Angela Perry]

Do you want to start with the.

[Dr. Randall]

Pups and then adults? I mean, they're now what? Matt, you said seven and a half months old.

[Phil]

7.5 months old.

[Steve Rinella]

And their tip and the scale is nearly £100.

[Dr. Randall]

They're little white, fluffy pups. That's cute.

[Phil]

Let me. Let me kick off a little bit. Despite characters like. Like, Game of Thrones is supposed to be up north, Right. It is a fictional. Yeah, it's like a world north show.

[Matt James]

Well, it takes place in Canada.

[Angela Perry]

It's a whole world. So there's, like, up north stuff. And down south.

[Matt James]

The family associated with direwolves. They're in the north.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Phil]

Okay. Despite. Because in my thing I have here, I wrote this, like, despite characteristics otherwise dire, wolves were southern animals. They range throughout the lower 48. They like the south and the hot so much that 4,000 died in LA. Have I told my story 18 times about my first date with my wife?

[Dr. Randall]

28 times.

[Phil]

Yeah. @ least there were dire Wolves in Mexico. There were dire wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of a dire wolf showing up in extreme southern Canada. A way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps, if you look where turkeys are, that's where dire wolves were.

[Dr. Randall]

Okay.

[Phil]

Little teeny bit in Toronto, like a little teeny bit in Ontario.

[Matt James]

The National Park Service says they were found as far north as Alaska.

[Phil]

That's not true.

[Matt James]

I'm just telling you what the National Park Service says.

[Phil]

We've debated that. We have even talked about it with our multiple people.

[Matt James]

But. But the one guy who debated it said that they weren't found at the La Brea Tar Pits.

[Phil]

Who said that? Angela Perry?

[Matt James]

No, he was an older feller. Got it. Got mildly uncomfortable because I was like, no, I've. I've seen him there.

[Phil]

Oh, we talk about that with the old person.

[Matt James]

Yeah, yeah.

[Phil]

We didn't and we did not.

[Matt James]

I. I could probably find it.

[Phil]

Not talking about the guy that fishes muskies all the time.

[Matt James]

We can come back to this.

[Phil]

I think you're hold. I think you're talking about a dream sequence.

[Steve Rinella]

They're definitely in La Brea.

[Phil]

A lot of them.

[Steve Rinella]

A lot of them.

[Phil]

I have to tell my story about my first date of my wife all over.

[Matt James]

No, I. I know, I know.

[Dr. Randall]

Oh, do you mean they seem to have liked Jack Carr? No, I'm not.

[Phil]

Jack Car said that.

[Dr. Randall]

Not. Sorry. We can revisit this.

[Matt James]

I. I will find it.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know why.

[Dr. Randall]

We know John Horner.

[Phil]

No, Jack Horner. He was on the show. Big dinosaur guy. Spencer doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Dr. Randall]

John Horner is a composer.

[Phil]

They seem to have, like, water. Florida and Texas have changed. I don't believe we have good archaeological sites showing humans and dire wolves together. How do you feel about that statement, Matt?

[Steve Rinella]

I think that's directionally accurate.

[Phil]

If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray wolf skull and you take 15 measurements on it, this is a good little tidbit. Four of those measurements are different. I'd like to know, a black bear and a grizzly bear. How many measurements are different on their skulls? So if you take like, somehow, like you're doing, like, skull morphology, they have four differences. Wider, wider and burlier than a gray wolf. Colossal says that 99.5% similarity between a gray wolf and a dire wolf. Which always sounds like a lot until you think about some other things. They say we have 60%. We humans have 60% genetic similarity with a carrot. So in this world. What I'm pointing out is in this world, little. Do you know what I mean? Like in this world, little things get different. I mean like the differences of. When you start talking about these like numbers, what you're arguing about is what comes after the last decimal point.

[Steve Rinella]

And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome.

[Phil]

Okay, Right.

[Steve Rinella]

So when you say 99.5%, you're still looking at 0.5% of 3 billion base pairs.

[Phil]

Yeah, a lot. But I mean like hearing it in the percentage thing gives you like a different idea.

[Steve Rinella]

And the percentage thing can be, is one way to explain it. It's a hard way to conceptualize it because at the same time you could say African elephant and Asian elephant are only 98% similar.

[Phil]

Oh well, because I was just going to point out that according and people debate these counts, humans and chimpanzees 98.8% similar.

[Steve Rinella]

And I think an important part to remember when we talk about percentages of genome is what part of the genome is coding for very specific traits that end up expressing as differences between us and a chimpanzee. Size, strength, musculature, hair. Some pretty significant differences. So that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't code for anything. It just sort of, you know, it's what we call non coding regions that we don't fully understand.

[Phil]

That's the part, that's the part of this that puzzles me that I don't get. And that's probably why you can't look up how much genetic similarity do we have with carrots? Which I was doing because it's like a lot of people are like, yeah, that's not really a good way of looking at it.

[Steve Rinella]

I've seen a few people that look like a carrot.

[Phil]

Well, this dude, the form of former.

[Dr. Randall]

His genetic similarity might be like 61%. 60.

[Phil]

Okay, explain that 0.5% like it like to you. Matt explained if, if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire wolf are 99.5% similar, what is the.05 and is it accurate to go and look and say like when I was thinking about this with chimpanzees, just to set up the question a little more specifically because everybody knows humans because you're one, we're all one. And we know chimps because we've been watching nature documentaries for a long time. So if humans and chimps are 98.8% similar. Is it fair to say 240 genes separate us from chimps, or is that a dumb way to look at it?

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, we're wading into dangerous territory. Because I'm more conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a geneticist back home. Right. I work with really smart people like Beth, who, who really explain these things really well. But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to say240 genes separate us from a chimpanzee.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That said, I mean, when we talk about the differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, what we're really looking for, what are the core phenotypes? What are those key areas of the genome? In that 0.5% that we need to target in order to confer the difference, the primary difference, which is, like you said, you know, sort of a. A robustness of a size, a musculature, a hair difference, a coat difference that we've identified. And how can we then identify those within that.05% and pick the few most impactful changes?

[Phil]

How do you decide? Okay, let's look at color. Why white?

[Steve Rinella]

So if you look at the genome of the dire wolf, and this is a really great question and one that kind of goes back to, you know, when you talk about having Dr. Perry on earlier. Right. Dr. Perry was part of a paper that came out in 2021, along with Beth Shapiro, our chief scientist, who sequenced the genome of the direwolf. And they only got what we would say is about 0.25% or 0.25x coverage. So sort of on average, they were able to sequence a quarter of the genome one time. Okay, so not a lot of data. We went back and we started and found two samples of dire wolf specimens that we were able to sample and sequence their DNA. One from a 72,000 year old skull and another from a 13,000 year old tooth.

[Phil]

Mm.

[Steve Rinella]

We ended up producing what we would call 13X coverage. So on average, we sequenced every base pair in that genome about 13 times. So that gives us a really robust data set as compared to the 2021 paper. What we identified when we have this new robust data set, is that they're between these two specimens. That one was from Idaho, one from Ohio, one from 72,000 years old, and one that's 13,000 years old. Both code for the same light coat color, not necessarily stark white like what we ended up getting, but they could have, and we don't know that, but.

[Phil]

Did you guys tweak it to make it White?

[Steve Rinella]

No. So it.

[Phil]

Cause it's like such a wild. I mean, you have to admit, like the Game of Thrones thing and people like the writer is involved with you guys. Like, he makes them white.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep. Well, he made one of them white.

[Phil]

Like for the show.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, there's five of them that are sort of characters in that show. Only one of them is white. The other have very typical morph. I'm sorry, wolf coat colors.

[Phil]

So. But when it was born, you didn't know what color it would be.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, yeah, we already knew because we had made that change. So.

[Phil]

So you had like purposefully made it white?

[Steve Rinella]

Yes, yes.

[Phil]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

So when we identified that definitely over this 60,000 years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution between Ohio and Idaho, both animals coded for a what? A very light colored coat as compared to what we would have seen in a gray wolf.

[Phil]

Like perhaps it was like coyote colored.

[Steve Rinella]

Could have been. Yeah, it could have been. Or it could be even lighter, like this white.

[Phil]

We saw mountain pale. Oh, if you look over your shoulder.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I mean, that could certainly be it. Or it could be white. You know, there, there are reasons for that. That white coat that could have persisted. But since we saw this common trait across space and time in these two specimens, we said, well, that's certainly interesting. We only have two sequences, so that means 100% of what we sampled had this coat color. So we said, well, we should code for that. The trick there is that we also identified very close to that gene and what we had seen. If you use the genetic background of a wolf, wolves that have that same mutation also often can have an issue with deafness or blindness. So we said, well, we don't want to use the exact variant from the direwolf genome that we sequence because it could confer a deafness or blindness issue.

[Phil]

Can you explain that more? I don't understand. I don't have the background to understand what you mean.

[Steve Rinella]

The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when we've seen that traitor in the.

[Phil]

In a gray wolf, like, did it unnaturally occur?

[Steve Rinella]

It's naturally occurring.

[Phil]

Oh, I see.

[Steve Rinella]

It would be closely associated with.

[Angela Perry]

So like a white gray wolf would be more likely to.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, exactly.

[Angela Perry]

Have that. Those issues.

[Steve Rinella]

So we made a decision. We said, well, so that.

[Phil]

That's not something that was found out. No, that's not something that people found out by trying to insert that into.

[Steve Rinella]

No, that's just from people that study canid genetics across, you know, across the multitude.

[Phil]

I didn't understand. I was like. Because I was like that would be a lot of experimentation to realize.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly.

[Phil]

I see.

[Steve Rinella]

So our computational team is able to sort of run these simulations that tell us what they think the gene will code for, what it could also be associated with, what could be an off target effect if you made that edit. And you know, it had an unintended consequence. So we elected. You'll, you'll see in our press release or in our news, we talked about, we made 20 edits across 15 genes with 15 specific direwolf variants. That means there are five variants that we edited for that were not actually direwolf. What we did is we went and found analogous genes in closely related species. In the case of the white coat, it was from domestic dogs. We chose that specifically because we wanted to confer the coat phenotype without risking welfare of the animal. So we made a decision, said the safest way in order to do this functional de extinction project we were working on without risking the animal's health or.

[Phil]

Welfare, was pluck it from a dog.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly. So that's why people go, is it 100% direwolf? And you go, well, number one, this whole 100% thing, we just talked about percentages of relatedness. It's kind of hard. It's not a very clean way to explain it. 100% is kind of a bullshit argument. But is.

[Phil]

Why is that not a good way of looking at it?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, just the variation between two individuals, like you and I have a significant variation. We're not 100% identical. So if aliens came and abducted you and I. Right. They would not then go and clone a human and make Corrine. Right. They would say, well, all humans look like you and I. Well, we know that we represent a very small portion of the genetic variability across the globe.

[Phil]

Well, the one's got an honorary doctorate.

[Steve Rinella]

That coded in there, I'm sure. Yeah.

[Phil]

You probably have a legit one, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Not a doctor. No. I stopped at the master's level and said, this isn't for me. So we tried to avoid this 100% thing because that's really cloning. We're not creating the identical individual we sequenced.

[Phil]

Yeah. Because I think this is the thing that people don't understand, and it's hard for me to understand, is that there's an idea from watching, like, Jurassic park or whatever.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

That you're able to pluck some living thing out of a direwolf bone and, like, add it into something. It's more like you're looking at trying to think of it like I shouldn't do an analogy, but it's like you're, you're looking at a, someone's got a paint sample and you're like, oh, I could make something that color. I don't know how they made that that color, but I could make something that color, right? Yep. And in the end, I'd look and be like, wow, that is that kind of same color, but it might have different constituent parts.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly, yeah.

[Phil]

Is that a good analogy?

[Steve Rinella]

I think that's a pretty good analogy. I might use it later too. That's a good one. I like it.

[Phil]

I'm refine it. Yeah, let me refine it for a day.

[Angela Perry]

A doctor should have a more refined.

[Steve Rinella]

The way I think about it is when we sequence ancient DNA, which is what Beth's specialty is. Right. When we go in, what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a 2 billion piece puzzle from that specimen. The DNA has been fragmented over time and time and, you know, things have been introduced, like bacteria that chop up DNA into small pieces. All we get out is we're able to sequence all that and we get these 2 billion puzzle pieces and we have to figure out how to put them back together. But we don't have the reference on the COVID of the puzzle. Right. So we have to use artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms in order to help tell us how to do that. We also have to align it to a close living relative. So then we go, well, we know a direwolf was sort of like a gray wolf, so we can start building towards a gray wolf. Then there are specific parts that we go, well, we know it wasn't totally gray wolf, so we have to start making educated decisions here, almost guesses as to what puzzle piece goes where. And so that's when you, you won't end up with 100% accurate representation of the animal you sequence because there was non viable DNA in there. You can't clone it. And now we're trying to put something back together without a clear picture of what it should have been.

[Phil]

Let me hit you with this one. Let's say you took one, you took one of your animals, Romulus or Remus, and you, heaven forbid, something were to happen to it, and you boiled its skull down and cleaned it up and threw it into a pile at La Brea Tar Pits, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

And then there's the person there sorting skulls. What do you think the likelihood is that they would grab that skull and they would throw it in the direwolf pile?

[Steve Rinella]

That's a good question. I Haven't thought about it that way. I would do it in a much less fatalistic way. We can use high tech CT imaging and actually 3D print. Their skeleton, which is one of the things we will be doing is as they mature, as they kind of come into their full size, we're using CT imaging in order to kind of get a clear picture of morphology from a skeleton.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah, I was gonna like Steve mentioned that we know like there's four skull measurements that are different. Like, did you build that into these?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. The direwolf variants we picked were specific to changes that we knew would be associated with those few morphological differences between the species.

[Phil]

So you could, you were, you looked in at like, what is with the wide skull, the strong skull or whatever you put it. You know, we talk about dogs and go, this is one. In reading all the coverage about your projects, why did the dogs get, why did the dog that birth, why was it a cesarean section?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, so it's a good question. I. So one of the things we did is while we were starting this project, me and my team, we put together this 160 page document that is the animal care manual of the dire wolf. Right. So we wrote an animal care and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with that's 12,000 years extinct. Super fun project in there. We had very specific protocols for how would we birth this animal. Well, one of the fears was, is we don't know the fetal development rate and the size of a newborn dire wolf. So we had one contingency was cesarean section. The other plan was natural birth. As we got closer, we were taking skull measurements via ultrasound and comparing that to the pelvic opening of our surrogate, turns out would have been totally fine. We could have passed those, those pups naturally.

[Phil]

That's the consideration.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. However, day 62 was sort of our cutoff. We said if she doesn't give birth by day 62, their gestation is about 60 to 63 days. But using cloning technology, usually you're a day or two ahead. Right. Because the, the embryo has developed in vitro before you've transferred it. So say day 62 might be more like day 64, day 65. So we just had just like most humans, sort of their doctor, if they're pregnant, will tell them, hey, if you don't give birth by this date, we will induce you.

[Phil]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we don't really do inductions with dogs. The safest way the, to remove all the variables was just a cesarean section and it's a very common procedure, dogs. And we have, you know, we had an amazing team of surgeons that were able to do it. And, you know, I think the results speak for themselves. We remove those variables. We give health, give birth to two healthy puppies, a third on a second litter. And then. And then all the moms, you know, ended up great, and now they're in their forever homes, you know, living life.

[Angela Perry]

When you say a second litter, like, did you. Was there only two puppies in. Like you weren't trying to grow six of them?

[Steve Rinella]

It was like, well, right. Embryology is a numbers game. If you've, you know, know anybody that's gone through ivf, you know, years ago, they used to put multiple embryos into. Into a mom. Same idea with us is when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know, 25 embryos, understanding that only two to six of those would take. In our case, we got two of them. We had another female that was. Had. Was pregnant with a second litter. And that's where Khaleesi, our third, our female direwolf, was born in January. She actually had a second puppy that she was born with. That puppy, unfortunately passed away on day 10 of an artist. So basically a perforated gut. And she got septically ill, which is, you know, we. We did a lot of looking and we were able to determine it wasn't related to any sort of effects of editing or cloning. It was sort of an unfortunate event of puppy development that we see, you know, a certain level of mortality. So that's how we got to three. We originally thought we were going to have four.

[Matt James]

Will the dire wolves be fertile?

[Steve Rinella]

Yes. Yeah, they would. They would be very fertile. We have specific strategies we can deploy in order to ensure that they would only breed when we intend to breed. Right now are interest is not inbreeding at the moment, but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive management of timing when the female is with the pack or outside of the pack.

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[Matt James]

Can you give us some other examples of things that are in this manual for raising a direwolf and how do I get my hands on one?

[Steve Rinella]

The manual or the direwolf?

[Matt James]

The manual? The manual. Well, both. But I'm settle for a manual.

[Steve Rinella]

The really cool thing is we published the manual is on our website. So if you go to thecolosal.com direwolf you'll see there is a downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the part, tuition issues. So how do you take care of a whelping litter of puppies to how do we manage them socially as they grow up? What is the diet that they should be eating as they grow? What are the expected milestones, developmental milestones? These are things we're sort of extrapolating from our work with gray wolves and other wild canids.

[Phil]

Who nursed them? The dog didn't nurse them.

[Steve Rinella]

So the dog did nurse them for the first few days. And, and so Romulus and Remus, their surrogate, was a very attentive mother and she got to be so attentive that she if you've ever had puppies with a mom, sometimes they get to be a little nervous and they pick them up and they just poke them too much starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we just said, you know, similar to the precautionary approach we took with cesarean section, we said we're going to pull them and we're going to hand rear them on bottles. So on day three we ended up pulling them.

[Phil]

Where's that dog now? That'd be a valuable dog.

[Steve Rinella]

It's a very valuable dog. And it was sort of become a.

[Phil]

Famous little, like a famous little donor dog.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, we did this. We worked with the American Humane Society is sort of the oldest global welfare society in the world. We worked through them to do a double blind adoption. So they vetted a home for them.

[Phil]

So whoever has it doesn't know.

[Steve Rinella]

They has no idea what they have.

[Phil]

Whoa. No. Really?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

They don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Correct. Nobody knows. I don't know where they Are. And. And the home doesn't know.

[Phil]

Someday that dog is gonna do like a lot of people do, where they start getting like, I need to find out my real parents. It's gonna look for its incredible Disney movie. It's trying to find its children. It'll be quite surprised when it finds them. You're so big and white. What kind of dog was this? You probably don't want to say, because. Give it up.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it was. It was. It was a mutt, right? It was. It was a large hound that was mixed with a lot of other.

[Phil]

Roughly how big?

[Steve Rinella]

Somewhere between 40 and 70 pounds.

[Phil]

Okay, so you're in a marriage. You know, I don't know if you're in a color. You recently got a dog. It's 40 to 70 pounds.

[Steve Rinella]

I should have adopted the dog, like, in Australia or something, where they would have no idea.

[Phil]

They'll never put together. Yeah, I know. It'd be like a real. It's a little science project. Huh. So that's what happened to it.

[Angela Perry]

What are you feeding those things now that they're six months old?

[Steve Rinella]

So they. They started on a very typical milk replacer formula once we pulled them from mom, and then we started introducing ground meats, like really slurried meats. And until they eventually started eating ground meats, mostly beef and. And horse meat.

[Phil]

Raw meat?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, raw meat. And then we also had some dry kibble in there. You know, essential nutrients, things that like that for development. Now that, you know, they're almost eight months old, we're. They're trans. They've transitioned from that sort of ground meat to whole prey items. So they'll get a whole rabbit, a whole chicken, they'll get a quarter of a deer, things like that. So we're starting to get them away from the two square meals a day to a sort of a gorge and fast, more similar to a wild cadence of feeding.

[Angela Perry]

Are they in, like, a big outdoor enclosure or.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

So I heard a rumor where it is.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, you did? Yeah. That should be good.

[Dr. Randall]

Wait, are you letting out rabbits?

[Phil]

Tell him the rumor privately. Yeah, I'll tell them the rumor. Private.

[Matt James]

In case it's accurate.

[Phil]

Because it might be accurate. I just heard, and I was like, really?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, that would be good. I want to hear that off air.

[Phil]

I'll tell you. I'll tell you what I. What I. I'll tell you what I heard.

[Steve Rinella]

I will tell you. They are in the northern continental United States. They live on about 2,000 acres of a wildlife preserve.

[Phil]

Oh, yeah, that fits.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Well, we might Be onto something. We might have to go, you know, snuff somebody out if they're telling our secrets. The real reason behind the secrecy is there. Did you guys see that? We came out with this news about a month before direwolf that we made a woolly mouse. Yeah, you saw this kind of a silly thing, but a lot of fun. The idea was this was like a phenotype validation study. We were taking traits we knew existed in woolly mammoths and that were targets for us to edit into woolly mammoth. But we wanted to say, oh, these edits are having the intended effect. So we didn't take the same woolly mammoth edit and edit that into a mouse. That just wouldn't work. We found the analogous genes in mice and conferred those changes. And we made these little woolly mice. The idea that it showed that they had the same effects on coat length, coat color, adipose tissue, things like that, that would be important to make an Asian elephant a woolly mammoth. We came out with that news and I thought, I can't believe we're going to go public with this thing. And it broke the Internet. People just started showing up at our front door of our office building, not where the mice are. They wanted one, they wanted to see one, they wanted to talk to the people that did that. So we quickly said, well, this was a month before launch of direwolf. We knew we were about to launch direwolf. We said, there's no way we can tell anybody even what state these animals are in because suddenly people will be showing up. And 2,000 acres is a lot to protect.

[Phil]

So if they're on 2,000 acres, they. There's no way you have a 2,000 acre parcel that's free of other animals.

[Steve Rinella]

No. Yeah, it's, it's.

[Phil]

So are they hunting whatever's on this 2,000 acres?

[Steve Rinella]

They're fed so regularly it's like a zoo animal.

[Phil]

But they're interacting. They're interacting with wildlife.

[Steve Rinella]

I've seen them chase deer off things like that. So they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it. But they also don't have some adult wolf that's showing. This is how we sort of stalk a prey and then we get on it. And this is the kill move. They don't have that yet. We could, over time and over generations do that similar to what they do with Mexican gray wolves and red wolves in terms of preparing them for introduction to the wild.

[Angela Perry]

And aren't you worried that, like, they could pick up like canine distemper or Some disease from a wild canine.

[Steve Rinella]

So we were pretty meticulous in our site selection process. And one of the things we wanted to ensure was that it was an area that, you know, gray wolves had been extirpated from. So there wasn't a potential issue there. Obviously there's still coyotes in those areas, so we have to worry about that. We have coyote proof fencing, but coyotes are pretty wily that can get through some of that.

[Phil]

So There you got 2000 acres with no coyote on it. There's going to be some people that want to talk to you, but, you.

[Steve Rinella]

Know, they undergo a pretty typical vaccination regimen similar to what we would do with other animals.

[Matt James]

I'm looking at the CARE program milestone. There's a lot of things about social interaction in here. How does that work when you only have two of these things?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we have three. So we have three. And there is an intention that we'll bring new litter on because our goal was to get to 6 to 8, sort of a typical pack size. Obviously, you know, we ended up at 3. So we'll look at adding another litter to that, to that group.

[Phil]

Hit me with. We're going to get into this earlier. Tell me the why. I mean, I get the why like. I get the why from a showman like that. You would build a park, right? You'd be able to use them for movies and that'd be valuable. You'd build a theme park and that would be valuable. But what is like the what is the why like? Or maybe that is the why. What is the why?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you could do those things. That is not our why. That is not what we're doing. Our why is really built more around. Around this selection process that we had about two years ago. We were looking at, you know, knowing that our big three projects, Woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, those are going to take us a while. We said, well, we should start working on other projects that we could also help develop some of these de extinction pipelines, get through this process a little quicker and be able to see and learn and help inform the other projects. In addition to that, in 2016, the IECN came out with a proxy species rewilding guide or creation guide. Basically this guideline document that an independent group of international experts wrote something like 35 key points in this guideline that talks about if you were to pursue de extinction or the creation of a proxy of an extinct species, which is easier, just called de extinction. Here is how you should do it. And one of the most important things that it talks about there is. There's a big welfare implication which sort of goes back to why we selected the specific edits we selected. There's also this process that these things should happen sort of in this contained, almost laboratory environment where we. If you're going to pursue this, the first time you do it, you should find a species that you know a lot about. You should do these things in a very controlled setting so you can study all the impacts from cradle to grave.

[Phil]

Oh, just, just to be clear, the IUCN did this independent of you guys.

[Steve Rinella]

In 2016, way before Colossal was the thing.

[Phil]

Oh, that long?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

So they were operating on a, like an assumption that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet.

[Steve Rinella]

And that was when I see the woolly mammoth extinction stuff was really bubbling up. And so it started. Biotechnology was getting to a point where they said we should come up with some sort of guidance ahead of time. Yeah. So it was really. It was great forethought. We use that as a bit of a guiding light in the way that we designed this project because. So we know a lot about canids and canid genetics, right? We know more about canids than almost any other species, mostly because we all have, you know, a gray wolf in our house, right. I mean, it is dog days, right? We all have dogs, we all love our dogs, we study a lot about them and we know a lot about North American canids. So that gave us a really strong foundation in order to be able to predict what were the effects of edits, what genes were responsible for, what physical trait, things like that. At the same time, there was this sort of opportunity for us to show the de extinction pipeline is a real thing. I think when we talk about bringing back woolly mammoths, people sort of giggle and they go, that's never going to happen. So there was sort of this proof of principle need that we said, well, we could show how this would work. And finally there was also the pop culture bit. You touched on direwolf, right? This idea that we could bring science into the pop culture, blend those, bring more eyes and attention onto de extinction, onto extinction conservation, things like that. So there was this perfect Venn diagram that sort of overlapped with gray wolf and direwolf, that we could do all of those things while creating technologies that were responsible or could help save other endangered canids like the American red wolf, which, you know, lost in our bit of a media circus that occurred after direwolf was this idea that we were also working on, American red wolves. And there's Some cool stuff that we should talk about there. But so the why was sort of that perfect opportunity to. To blend in pop culture with a proof of principle of de extinction and taking that first pass at de extinction that this 2016 guideline sort of showed us how to do it. And that really outlined, you know, know a lot about the animal. Put them in an area where you can study them closely, and these would not be animals that would be a generation ready for release. We knew dire wolves were not going back into the wild. We made these as part of that pursuit of de extinction.

[Phil]

So you do. You do it knowing they won't go into the wild?

[Steve Rinella]

Because that's.

[Phil]

That's another question I was going to have is how much do. Like, how much. How worried are wildlife professionals. This is a question they hadn't had to grapple with before. How worried are wildlife professionals and conservationists that you would create a. That you would, like, create a creature that could potentially get out and then reproduce with imperiled species in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species? Like, that's got to be a real concern. We're having a conversation right now where guys are, like, in the deer, in the cervid world, people are saying, oh, we can make. We have some examples of deer that are very slow to develop cwd, or they get cwd, but they're slow to be affected by it. And they say, what we'd like to do is cut these deer loose. Just to introduce some of this, besides, it being as it's been explained to me by many cervid experts, is kind of like, doesn't make sense when you understand the scale of the millions of deer out there and that you're going to try to, like, influence gene flow by cutting animals loose. But they also point to all these moral issues and other, like, issues, like, what if those things also carry a susceptibility to other diseases? What if that infers upon them a sort of hidden weakness? Right. So if you have these creatures and they get out and they start breeding with wolves, I assume they could breed with wolves. How nervous are people that that'll happen?

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, that's a question we get almost every day when people talk about it. So first, the first step to protect against that is the facility itself. You know, extremely secure. Double fence, actually triple fence, if you include our perimeter fence. You know, we just. We've had to have really thorough conversations with government agencies to explain all the measures that have been taken to ensure it's a biosecure Facility. So there's that piece of it. The other side of it is, is really sort of like the CWD example is really good, is, you know, we, we need to know more about these animals before you would ever cut something loose. Whether it's a direwolf or it's a woolly mammoth. Right. We need to know a lot about these animals. And what are the effects of gene editing, what are the effects of cloning, what are the effects of the specific edits we chose. Which is exactly why we chose Direwolf, because we knew it would stay in this area and we can do that cradle to grave sort of research with them. So this is a great opportunity for us to show what are those impacts. But you know, the CWD example is really interesting because you are, you know, we get the question about playing God a lot. And that is sort of one of those sort of God decisions we're making. As we said, these animals have this specific prion gene that makes them more resistant or, you know, more can, can bear the, the prionic disease more than others. But what are the, what are the things that tag along with that? Or if all that's, say all the whitetail in Texas were suddenly wiped out by CWD and only the animals that were released there are, are remain, you've created this sort of genetic bottleneck. Because my guess is you didn't make 10,000 of those. Right. You only made a hundred of them. So there is that. You know, there, there are a lot of these ethical decisions we have to have. I love de extinction. I love Colossal. I love the direwolf project because it push puts that debate forward. Because we're going to have to start having these conversations more.

[Phil]

That's like in my mind, that is the, that is the conversation. And I credit like to get somewhere like, you know, let's say you look at the people that are eager about the idea of colonizing Mars. Yeah, there's all kinds of questions, huge questions about the possibility of that. But at some point you just go like, well, we'll start going that direction. We'll solve what we can solve. Understanding that there could possibly be a wall that we don't see. Like you start before the pathway is clear. Yep. Right. Just like, I don't know, we'll start walking that way. And when what happens? What happens? May we fall off the end of the earth at some point it was off or not, but we got to start asking questions, answer questions. I feel that with anything to do with de extinction, like, because I don't Understand the science. I'm not like trained enough, smart enough to understand the science.

[Steve Rinella]

You are a doctor though.

[Phil]

I am other area a forestry. I can't understand the science. Like I'm incapable of understanding science, but I can understand this. At some point the de extinction process will be that we have like, we have a Tasmanian tiger or a thyroid or an approximate, we have an approximate ivory billed woodpecker. We humbly ask your permission to let it go. And like I can just imagine the resistance. Oh yeah, maybe even a knee jerk resistance, maybe an unwarranted resistance. But that will that to me not insurmountable. But that to me is the final argument.

[Angela Perry]

Because there's gotta be a, like what's gonna happen if we do? Yes, we want to see what's gonna happen.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. But I think what's missed often in that sort of, that very conservative approach to these things of, well, we need to answer every question before we take the next step is what is the opportunity cost of not acting? Yeah, right. If we could restore thylacine to Tasmania, could we start to reduce wildlife disease and, and level out prey populations in a way that helps support biodiversity of Tasmania? Yeah, I think we could. Are there some other negative effects? There might be and we should understand those. But we also can't say we need to tick 100% of the boxes before we take the next step because we will never get anywhere. Yeah, I think, you know, Teddy Roosevelt had that really famous quote, in the moment of any decision, the best thing to do is the right thing. The next best thing to do is the wrong thing and the worst thing to do is nothing. Right. And so that's really our mentality is we need to push forward, we need to push technologies forward that give us an opportunity to solve for some issues. And could there be this butterfly effect that creates an unforeseen issue? Absolutely. Should we be prepared as possible before we take those steps? Absolutely. I'm not debating that. But right now there is, there is an issue in the conservation community that we are accepting status quo because we're afraid of the unknown. And we haven't acknowledged that status quo means a reduction of biodiversity over the next 25 years of maybe up to 50% of the biodiversity that exists today. We need to start taking steps and bringing tools to the, to the conservation game that create fundamental change, that create magnitudes of change, because we are getting our asses kicked on the biodiversity front.

[Angela Perry]

So another why that I've heard is like why work with a species like a dire wolf that ultimately Proved to be, like, unsuccessful. You know, it had its time and then was unable to cope with whatever changes led to its extinction. Why not work with, like, Siberian tigers that are, like, imperiled and you could.

[Phil]

Grow those because they won't let them cut them loose.

[Angela Perry]

I'm just saying.

[Steve Rinella]

I think it's also not a either or proposition. That's not how we work. We are a more is more. Yes. And type of group. So we loved using de extinction as this ability to bring new eyeballs, new funding to the table, bring attention and awareness and money to the conservation battles that we face on the endangered species front by using de extinction as an engine to fuel that fight. So with the, with the de extinction of the dire wolf, we have also been working on the genetic rescue of the American red wolf. Right. The red wolf, declared extinct in the wild in 1980. In the 60s and 70s, U.S. fish and Wildlife realized that we had almost killed them all. So they went to Louisiana and Texas and they captured what they thought was the remaining group of red wolves using very specific morphological measurements. Similar to this direwolf gray wolf debate. Right. Well, what. In reality, what they did is they caught 14 animals and they said this is now the founding population of a captive group that will then be kept in human care until we figure out how to get them back into the wild.

[Phil]

Yeah. And what, what was the island they put them on?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah, I can't even. Saint Elizabeth.

[Phil]

Was it off South Carolina?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it was off South Carolina. Now they're. Now they're in northeastern North Carolina, which is the experimental release site. Well, the problem with that is they were looking for a very specific phenotype, and they didn't have the power of genetics in the 70s when they were trying to understand what was a red wolf and what was a coyote in Louisiana and Texas. So what they did is they caught 14 animals that fit a very specific bill. Wind the clock back about eight, nine years ago, Bridget Von Holt from Princeton University and Chris and Bresky from Michigan Tech, they rediscovered that there is actually this extremely high level of red wolf ancestry in that canid population in Louisiana, Texas. And if you look at the genetics of those canids from this sort of hot spot, and it radiates out, you can see that the proportion of red wolf within these, these Louisiana and Texas populations is about 70% red wolf, 30% coyote. As you radiate out, you sort of flip it. And by the time you get to, like, Dallas, where I live, it's totally inverse. It's barely any red wolf. And totally coyote. So this is a very unique group of canids that have persisted since the 70s. Meanwhile, the closed population that's used, the captive population that's used for reintroduction to North Carolina has had the same 14 founders. Actually only 12 of those bred and are represented. So now you have about 250, 270 animals in a captive population that stemmed from 12 individuals. Huge genetic bottleneck. And totally missed some of the phenotypic diversity of the red wolf. Going back to if aliens abducted you and I, they would have missed all the people living in Asia and Africa and South America. And they would, you know, they would think everybody looks like, like, like us. And that would be a horrible representation of, of what our species actually is. They did similar to that, they missed a lot of genetic diversity that still exists there. So we've created, using the same technology used to make dire wolves, we now have this ability to be able to sequence all of these red wolves or these Gulf coast canids is what we call them or ghost wolves because they have such high levels of genetic ancestry of the American red wolf. They also have a portion of their genome that's not assigned to any other canid. So it's likely that ghost portion is the ancestral red wolf, the pre extinction red wolf that we don't have a reference to yet. But we're creating, we're doing historic sequencing to understand before the extinction what was red wolf. And then that would assign how much red wolf are these coyotes? Now that's an opportunity. And this is one of the things we've been meeting with the US Government and Secretary Bergamot is now we have this opportunity to create a genetic rescue tool that could be sort of an opportunity to the U.S. fish and Wildlife Recovery Program to say your species is sort of headed for extinction because of its extreme genetic inbreeding. We have a fresh set of genetics that we could plug into your population and help sort of revitalize. Similar to when Texas cougars went into the Florida panther population. We could do that type of genetic.

[Phil]

Rescue effort which was controversial at the.

[Steve Rinella]

Time and now people hail it as one of the biggest successes, but it.

[Phil]

Was like, well, you're corrupting the Florida gene pool or you're corrupt. It's not the same thing. Yeah, those Florida panthers will now be not quite Florida panthers, but they won't.

[Steve Rinella]

Be cross eyed and kicked out.

[Phil]

Yeah. And people are like, well, they're closer than none.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Phil]

Would be the.

[Steve Rinella]

That's our focus is function within an ecosystem. Can we create a direwolf that would have performed the same function in its ecosystem? Or can we help rescue a species and it still perform the same function? The answer is yes, we absolutely can. And we need to be more focused on the pragmatic idea of what function does a species provide to its ecosystem versus genetic purity and this weird eugenics mentality we have about species. So that's why we sort of, I think, raise eyebrows, is because we are more focused on that side than. Than this idea of what is 100% gray wolf, what is 100% direwolf.

[Angela Perry]

I think there's some of the blowback is like you have an animal and that animal is that animal out in the wild. And it becomes like less wild when you start tinkering with its genes and laying the hand of man on it. And you know what I mean?

[Phil]

But in that case, the hand of man, I mean, they were in a pen off of. They were in an enclosure on an island.

[Angela Perry]

Right.

[Phil]

To build up a reproducible. No, I understand. I'm just saying it's very different.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, well, yeah. And the hand to man is why they're going extinct. Right. We were. Yeah, we were sure poaching them out of existence.

[Phil]

But let me hit you with a crit. Let me. A red wolf criticism.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

And in some ways, I think this criticism was a little bit unfair because it's not like you're taking federal money that would normally go to red wolf recovery and using it for something else.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly.

[Phil]

So it's like, it's what the work is additive. But there's the criticism that would say this. Like, guys that work on the red wolf problem are like, our problem is that people shoot them. Yep. And they get hit by cars.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Phil]

So we're not looking for new animals. We're looking for how do we create an atmosphere in a place where they don't get shot and hit by cars. So it was like, it's like, that's beside the point.

[Steve Rinella]

It is. It is not a silver bullet to the red wolf problem. It provides a genetic rescue and buys them more time. Their captive population will begin to suffer as it's a closed population. Right. So this gives us an opportunity to inject fresh genetics. Also, that North Carolina site, you know, whatever, you take it back eight years ago or so, the US Fish and Wildlife announced, hey, we're going to start finding a second site, a parallel effort. Because obviously, you know, if you're familiar with the red wolf issue, red wolf population in that area got north of 150 individuals in around 2013. Basically, people started shooting them, they started getting hit by cars. Today their primary issue is car strikes. What's interesting is it's a different area. In Louisiana and Texas you have larger landscapes, but you don't have. You don't have as many public lands that protect the animals there. And those animals have persisted since we thought they would have gone extinct. I think there is this weird issue that people sort of say, well, if we acknowledge that these animals are predominantly red wolf or maybe even truly red wolf, as we understand more about their genetics, that's also acknowledging the fact that we didn't need to intervene in 1970s, they would have continued to persist in that area.

[Phil]

Yeah. Because where they do or they did bring them, they've tried to keep coyotes. Yeah, right. Like that understanding of that species with coyotes. And then here you have that other source population that probably has a bleeding edge where coyotes roll in.

[Steve Rinella]

People talk about admixture. You know, people will say call it hybridization. Hybridization is the wrong word. But admixture, sort of this idea that two species have this blending of genetics, they look at that as a bad thing, as diluting the gene stock of a species. But you know, hybridization and admixture of species is a natural process. It's actually an evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advant advantages to animals, gives them the opportunity to thrive with a new within an evolving habitat. They can look at a species and say, oh, that coyote actually is, you know, much faster or stronger, whatever it is, and they breed with that and that, that. It brings that into their gene pool. That's an adaptive strategy.

[Phil]

That's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system of, you know, that we. What's wolf? Canis lupus.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, Canis lupus.

[Phil]

We're homo sapiens. The rainbow trout is on Corinth.

[Angela Perry]

This.

[Phil]

Micus.

[Angela Perry]

Micus.

[Phil]

Yeah, whatever the hell. You go in and you say like, I'm going to take all creatures on Earth and I'm going to say that they're all. Whatever causes you to lose sight of the long time. And the long time is that there's fluidity.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Phil]

Things. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

It's similar.

[Phil]

Things come together and fall apart. And it's not static. It's a snapshot.

[Steve Rinella]

When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem. We say, recover to what? Right, recovering. You know, in, in North American centric conservation, we say recover to 1492. Right. Recovered before Europeans came in and ruined the place.

[Phil]

Yeah, that's always my view. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But, you know, there was a. There Ebbs and flows before that and there would have been ebbs and flows after that. At what point? Why do we pick an arbitrary point in time? Why do we pick an arbitrary definition of a species in time to say that's the species? I think it makes sense from a communication standpoint. We need to be able to talk about these things, classify things, have goals. That's very important. But to use that as this ideology that we cannot stray from, I think is naive.

[Phil]

When I had many conversations with friends of mine in the wildlife world when Colossal made its announcement about the direwolves, one of the conversations, I can't remember who the hell I was talking to, was saying to me, you know where this would be really helpful? Black footed ferrets.

[Steve Rinella]

Absolutely.

[Phil]

Black footed ferrets went through a 10 ferret bottleneck. Okay. But I want to return, I want to do the regulatory thing about ivory billed woodpeckers and black footed ferrets. Who, like who? What would ever have to say okay to, to be that, like our population, our global population of black footed ferrets was reduced down to 10 animals.

[Steve Rinella]

Animals.

[Phil]

But we have all these specimens that show a level of genetic diversity that did not exist in those ten black footed Ferris aren't getting shot, they're not getting run over. Right. They're fairly easy to protect. Who has to say yes to start inferring lost genetic diversity into black footed ferrets? Like who will be the, who is the one that goes, okay, it's, it's, it's hard.

[Steve Rinella]

So black footed ferret's a great example because they've been using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue black footed ferret because people were banking tissues of black footed ferrets back into the 70s.

[Phil]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

So if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone that they brought back. She was, you know, an unrepresented founder. They cloned her. Unfortunately, that, that single individual, she didn't actually, she wasn't able to reproduce, but they cloned her again. And now they've had the first ever clone, breed and give give birth to offspring.

[Matt James]

Who's they?

[Steve Rinella]

The U.S. fish and Wildlife Service Recovery Program. So that's where we would start. You start with the US Fish and Wildlife Service because they are the ones that are mandated by the Endangered Species act to recover species listed by the act. So they have the jurisdiction in that area. Now if we're just using cloning like what they did, U.S. fish and Wildlife has been able to do that on their own. Now if we were to bring colossal type technology, which is Cloning plus genetic editing. And we said one of the primary drivers of the black footed ferret extinction crisis we're facing is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is present in their obligatory prey species, the, the prairie dog. Prairie dog. Thanks. Yeah, that's a hard one to remember. So prairie dogs are carrying Sylvia plague and that when they predate on a, on an animal that has plague they also get plague and they die. We know for, for a fact that the closest living relative of the black footed ferret, which is the domestic ferret, has a naturally occurring resistance to plague and it's a very small change. So you could go in and make a genetic edit within the black footed ferret genome and suddenly ferrets are resistant to black footed to, to sylvatic plague. And now we can make a huge difference in the recovery of, of Blackfoot affairs.

[Phil]

But now it's like now we're going to have whatever.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, now someone's gonna not like this. Now we're dealing with multiple agencies. The usda, the fda, they all have, they all have some jurisdiction in what we call intentionally altered genomes.

[Phil]

Okay.

[Angela Perry]

There are examples of US Fish and Wildlife Service like saying this is an acceptable level of genetic representation. Like in Colorado they like with cutthroat trout they would find like an isolated like subspecies of cutthroat trout and be like it's like pretty much there. So we're gonna put it back into this place. And so I mean someone's capable of saying like it's close enough.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And that's U.S. fish and Wildlife typically. But once we start getting into gene editing. Sure. Start inviting more regulators the table and that's what we're doing right now. And we're actually pushing the boundaries of the regulatory environment because this, you know, these were all hypotheticals and now they're realities and people are scrambling to say how the hell do we do this?

[Phil]

So could you run? Could you. How long does a black footed ferret live?

[Steve Rinella]

10, 12 years.

[Phil]

Okay, could you run, would it make sense that you would run a generation? Right. You'd make a plague resistant black footed ferret if you ran it for a gen. If you just let it go for a generation in captivity, would you then be able to be like, would you then be able to dispel, would that be enough time to dispel some of the questions?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think.

[Phil]

Or does it take like would you have to run five generations?

[Steve Rinella]

That's a good question.

[Phil]

So that puts you 60 years down the road.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean I certainly don't think Colossal has the answer for that, for that specific question. I think that is a regulatory question. You know, at what point do we feel comfortable with this now, knowing that they have a close living relative with this exact gene? Do we, how much do we need to do? Because we've studied domestic ferrets for hundreds of years. Right. That might inform what's happening here. But I think you could set up an experimental population where you're able to do a lot of those things and within a generation or two begin to put animals back into the wild. Now, the trick with black footed ferret is that, you know, we probably need to find some resistance for prairie dogs as well. All right. If they're going to continue being the vector of the disease, you need to remove the vector. And they have to, you know, you have to have prairie dogs because prairie dogs or black footed ferrets rely on their, their holes, plus they eat them. So ranching folk don't really love prairie dogs. They create a lot of problems for cattle. And so to go and convince people that we should do something, protect prairie dogs might be a harder sell.

[Phil]

Like, you feel that, that the constant exposure could, in time, that the susceptibility could, could return potentially. I see, yeah. Yeah.

[Matt James]

A month ago, Time magazine reported that the Mandan and Arikara tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying. So two things. One, that seems to go against what you said earlier about the dire wolves living in the wild. And then two, what is that tribal communication been like with you guys about why they have a desire to have dire wolves on their reservation?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I wouldn't say it goes against what I was saying earlier. I think it would be replicating what we've done already, but on tribal lands.

[Matt James]

So like a 2,000 acre enclosure.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So a year and a half ago, we, we launched Colossal's indigenous council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community from the indigenous world to the table to say, how can we enhance the conservation work you're already leading? How could we adopt, you know, things like coexistence strategies that, that our Native American partners have been much better at than we have. And, and so part of that was, you know, one of the reasons for direwolf when we were launching is we were working with Chairman Fox at MHA Nation in North Dakota, and we were talking to him about some bison genetic work that we were doing because Beth has a big background in bison genetics. And Chairman Foxhead started telling us an origin story of his people. And it talks about the great wolf, which was this large, extremely large wolf. It was a white wolf or a light colored wolf similar to what we're talking about. And it was part of their origin stories passed down through oral tradition. And their people believe that, that, that they had coexisted with dire wolves and that's part of their origin story. So there was a big interest. They said if you guys are able to do this, we would love to bring the direables back to our land. So we can also honor this, this ancestral wolf that's important to our people.

[Matt James]

Who is done. This is a global story. Who's done a good or a bad job from your perspective of covering it?

[Steve Rinella]

That's a, that's a great question. I don't know.

[Phil]

I don't. You could name the bad one. Yeah, there was one that was crazy.

[Steve Rinella]

What's that one like?

[Phil]

I don't even want to say on there. It was like a cult reporter.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh yeah, we won't give them any clicks. That was wild. That was, that was just Looney Tunes stuff. I think there's some been some bad stuff. A good example is what is the Cowboy Statesman. There's a Wyoming publication, Right. They wrote an article about, you know, this is what's going to happen when direwolves introduced to Yellowstone. Like there's such a leap of logic. So many steps.

[Phil]

There was cut right to the end.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And it was just, you know, this is going to be horrible for Yellowstone.

[Matt James]

You know I like their stuff generally, but they are kind of bulldogs. I could see how they could take a story like this and do exactly what you're saying.

[Phil]

Yeah, but it's. Yeah, it was skipping a lot of steps.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Another one that did a poor job that I was disappointed with because it's a friend of ours that we know pretty well was the Washington Post said after Secretary Bergam had come out with a public statement of support for de extinction technologies as a tool for conservation, was basically the headline was this really superficial stretch that said, oh, Secretary Bergam and the Trump administration will use de extinction to gut the Endangered Species Act. And they've said that. Well, they didn't say that. I mean his quote, which is pretty powerful and I was blown away that he took such a bold stance, basically said this is technology that could be fundamentally game changing to the recovery of species which would lead to delisting. This wasn't just gutting the endangered.

[Phil]

I read that and that was. But that's a very common kind of environmental reporting.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

That it was, he was, he said something to the effect of in a perfect world we would never get there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Phil]

And then that was taken. Like in a perfect world we would never get to needing the esa.

[Steve Rinella]

Incorrect.

[Phil]

Which would wind up being if you polled a bunch of Americans and said would you like to live in a world where the Endangered Species act was never necessary. Everyone would go, well sure, he says that and it's that he must mean he's going to get rid of it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it was disappointing and it happens.

[Phil]

It was a wild extrapolation. But I see what they were getting at. They were getting at that it'd be like, oh, they're gonna use a squishy definition. Right. Like, like here's the fear, I'm guessing, like what's driving the mentality would be that you get down to 10 black footed ferrets and someone said like, wow, they really should have ESA protection. And they'd be like, don't worry, we just ordered 200.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Phil]

Yeah, right.

[Steve Rinella]

But what's missing?

[Phil]

And like that's like, I think that's what they're getting.

[Steve Rinella]

That would become the play in that sort of, that just, you know, menu of options in order. The next species of interest. What's missing in that whole thing is habitat. Right. And that's what I think a lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very hard line stance are missing is this idea that recovery has very specific parameters around habitat requirement. Right. And sustainable population in the wild. So in order to achieve recovery there's a habitat requirement also I think de extinction technologies and using DE extinction technologies to recover endangered species also has this really great sort of beacon of hope and sort of inspirational effort that if we said tomorrow we could bring back the ivory billed woodpecker, would we start suddenly protecting, be doing a better job of protecting habitat in Arkansas?

[Angela Perry]

Well, that's the thing I mean is the ESA comes with what many people would call like onerous regulations. Right. Regarding protecting habitat. Other people would be like, oh no.

[Steve Rinella]

It'S like we need that, we need more. Yeah.

[Angela Perry]

So bringing them back doesn't necessarily solve the problem.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly. It is a tool that could help accelerate and scale recovery. Yeah, that's what it is.

[Phil]

I want, I want a narrow one on the ivory billed woodpecker. Maybe you can correct me on some of this, but here's why it excites me. It's like there still is habitat.

[Steve Rinella]

There is people gotta more today than when they went extinct.

[Phil]

Yeah. Like, I mean there was a lot of habitat destruction that led to the Problem. But there is habitat. This was so recent. Right. There's people alive right now. There are people alive that saw ivory billed woodpeckers.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. There's actually like photographs of them. There's a reel to reel video of what they think was the last ivory billed woodpecker leaving as singer was cutting down the tree.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like it's pretty powerful.

[Phil]

Yeah. There's like. Yeah, that's the craziest part about it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Dan Flores talks about that in Wild New World is they're like, oh yeah, there's some in that tree. I mean, I'm not joking. Literally. They actually cut the tree during a logging project. There was a contentious logging project. Cut the tree. No one really knew that it was the last ones, but they knew it was damn near and it turned out probably to be the last ones. They cut the tree down.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

With the thing in there as like a hey man, don't tell me what to do kind of thing. So here you have. Where there's habitat. It's. It like it's hard to put it like it might as well have not gone extinct, you know, I mean like it's like it went extinct. It seems to almost have gone extinct by like a freak chance or it might as well. If it didn't, if it had, if it had stayed intact, we wouldn't think it was weird.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Follow me.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Phil]

If, if we had, if we had kept short faced bears intact, it would be a thing that people remarked on every time they killed a person. You know, it'd be like, my God, can you believe? Right. The same way we marvel over alligators, we marvel over grizzly bears, we marvel over polar bears. It'd just be a bird. Yep. It'd be like a bird. That was kind of cool, but like a bird, you know. So like it's not an earth shattering environmental thing to have it around. The ranch and farm community is not gonna have a be jeopardized by this.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Phil]

I can't think of anyone except a pileated woodpecker that would maybe be annoyed. That would like they're like, dude, we were the biggest woodpecker. Now we're not. Like they might be annoyed, but it's just. There's no. It doesn't seem like there's friction.

[Steve Rinella]

No, there's not. There is.

[Phil]

If you go like, how do you feel about bringing the ivory built woodpecker back? Most people would be like, the what? Yeah, like us woodpecker is here not long ago. We're gonna put it back. It's A woodpecker. They'd probably be like, okay, just leave me alone. I feel like. Like, that seems to me just from a novice perspective, that seems to me like the thing to do first.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, first is hard, right? There's technical challenges in de extinction of a bird, right? So we have the dodo project, which is our flagship avian species, and this is sort of leading the charge in overcoming the technical challenges. The biggest challenge is there is an important step in de extinction where you've edited a cell line to the point where you go, this is now a cell of the animal of interest. This is now a direwolf cell. Now we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is most famously Dolly the sheep cloning. That's called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and that's taking the DNA from that cell, removing the DNA of an egg cell and putting your DNA in, and that fertilizes the cell and it becomes an embryo, and then you can transfer it into a surrogate. With birds, very early on in the development of their egg, they're calcifying the outside of it. We can't access the eggs internally of a bird. We have to wait for them to lay those eggs. So we are creating new platforms in order to edit germ cells, or the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. So as egg is laid, you can window the egg, you can extract a few microliters of blood, you can plate that blood and take out what we call them primordial germ cells. Those primordial germ cells are the cells that are circulating freely in the blood of this early fetus, and they eventually migrate to the gonads and they become sperm or egg, depending on the gender of that egg. If we then edit those while they're plated, you can create a stable line of these in vitro. Then now you have edited the germ cell that will eventually become sperm or egg, and then in a different egg, which is, you know, sort of an egg that's been engineered to be sterile so they don't produce any other own sperm or eggs. At that same point of development, you inject your edited germ cells, they migrate to the gonads. And then you could have a pigeon or chicken that's creating the sperm or egg of a dodo. When they breed, they give birth, they lay a dodo egg, or in this case, and I rebuild woodpecker egg. So we're overcoming those challenges right now. We don't know a lot about woodpeckers, so we need to study more. Last year, we launched Colossal's nonprofit, the Colossal Foundation. I'm the executive director of that foundation. Which is meant to sort of be where the rubber of de extinction meets the road.

[Phil]

Where meaning the road being the regulatory structure.

[Steve Rinella]

Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally keep species off our to do list? Right. But also in some cases there's a North American conservation focus of that. So one of the flagship projects for the foundation is the ivory billed woodpecker.

[Phil]

What is more, is it Mauritius?

[Steve Rinella]

Mauritius, yeah.

[Phil]

What is their attitude toward the dodo?

[Steve Rinella]

It's interesting, it's. It is a culturally significant icon of Mauritius. It is also closely associated with colonization. Right. As colonizers showed up, they brought this species that wiped out this the dodo. Now what's interesting is there's. There was not.

[Phil]

Wasn't it people that wiped out the dodo?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. It was the colonizers that came in. Right. But what's interesting is Mauritius didn't have an indigenous people at that time. Right. So they sort of came into the island, they introduced invasive species. So it was primarily rats and cats that were introduced to the island that started decimating a ground nesting bird and a flightless bird at that. That's what led to the dodo.

[Phil]

Plus sometimes I thought they just ate them all.

[Steve Rinella]

There is a common misconception that they were a favorite food of sailors. There are also some really interesting, funny logs you can read of sailors that said they would bring them on to provision the boat and then people would just resent having to eat it because it was all they had. It was this gross greasy bird. So it was probably some combination thereof. But the real issue was habitat was being destroyed as people came in to make room for colonies and invasive species were just wiping out nests. And the dodo hadn't evolved with a mammalian predator. So it didn't have this natural instinct to run or to do anything. So you know, I think they said from the time dodo was discovered to it when extinct was 80 years. It's just a really rapid extinction event. So Mauritius is really interested in recovering the dodo. They would look on Mauritius. Yeah. So we engaged directly with the government of Mauritius, with the Mauritian Wildlife foundation to talk about how can we use de extinction to drive conservation projects and habitat restoration projects on the island of Mauritius and the islets that surround Mauritius. And then also in preparation for dodo, can we start to find habitat? Suitable habitat that would include us removing invasive species, not just invasive animals, but invasive plants have taken over. How can we restore the lost ebony Trees. How can we start to bring back the forest of the 1600s in order to prepare it for the dodo? And so there's this amazing interest. We have this great underswell of support. We've launched a council of people, a stakeholders group that is about 10, 15 people that sort of represent a variety of industry from tourism to science to government and regulatory, so that we can begin to say, hey, we're making progress towards restoring the dodo from extinction. What do we need to be doing here with the people of Mauritius, with the land of Mauritius, in order to make sure society is prepared and ecosystems are prepared.

[Phil]

So crystal ball it for me. What? Okay, never. Not the science, the social component. If you had to crystal ball the social component, what are the odds socially, socially regulatory, whatever, that you would get, that you could get to where they would say, let's do it, let's take this little eyelet and let's put some out. And they're just gonna, they're gonna just live or die based on their ability to make a living here.

[Steve Rinella]

99. Oh, I would never say anything's a hundred percent because we could get wiped out by an asteroid. But right there, there's no, I mean.

[Phil]

I'm ruling out that, I'm ruling out like, like that the Earth kind of keeps going along.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think it's 99.

[Phil]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Beth and I went to Mauritius last year and had an incredible visit. We're going again this year and the idea is to kind of keep these conversations moving forward. Mauritius has done an incredible job on their own of going and recovering some of the islets around there. There's this really famous island or islet on the north end of Mauritius called Round Island. It's this massive round rock island. You know, you can't even, you know, we landed a helicopter on it in order to get out there. And you're sort of at this 20 degree angle as you land and you're landing on top of giant tortoises. And it was basically an island that was stripped down to just the rock. All the soil and plant life had been completely eradicated because they had introduced goats. And the goats were left there so that when you sailed by, you could pick up a few, you know, and you could provision the boat. Well, they just grazed the hell out of the whole thing. And basically every species native to that little islet was basically wiped out. So they've been recovering it for 20 years.

[Phil]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

And when you go and see where they, where to where they are today, it's incredible work.

[Phil]

So for other reasons, they've been recovering it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. They just wanted to bring back Grand Island. It has a lot of endemic species that were important to, to try to save. So they're, they're already doing this great work, I think. Colossal. Showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance, bring more funding, try, try to bring technology to the table to do just that. So there are opportunities. The reason why I think it's so high in Mauritius, the chances are so high in Mauritius, it's because there's all these islets that are sort of like living laboratories. You know, you can mitigate risk of some of these fears around GMOs or, or what is going to be the effect of this reintroduction by putting them on an island.

[Angela Perry]

Yeah, like if. If suddenly tomorrow all the grizzly bears in the lower 48 went extinct, caught a virus and you guys were like, oh, that's okay. We can, we can repopulate. There's still only. So there. There's not a lot of appropriate habitat available for them. Right. So in an island situation, you have way more control over, like, but it, but it seems like your challenge is not like growing the animal. It's like cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges around preparing the habitat for one of these animals and making sure the protections are in place, but also making sure that the people are ready for that. I think this is a huge step for a society to say, we want to take this next step. Whoever will be the first government regulator, culture, to say we want to introduce a species returned from extinction to the wild. I mean, that is a massive step. I mean, that is going to take somebody very bold. And I think that's why island nations are a little more. They have a little more opportunity because they can mitigate the risk because they don't have to worry about their neighbor saying, timeout. You're doing what? You know, if we did this in the U.S. canada would say, what the hell are you doing?

[Phil]

Yeah, yeah, we know. It's a little bit interesting. A similar approach was we want to introducing wild turkeys in a lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. So they think that historically you had turkeys in what's today 34 states. Now we have turkeys in 49 states. Very little friction. I remember one state there was some friction in there and it was worried about some rare anole. And these guys wound up doing a big crop survey, like bird crops, you know, and they just didn't find anything analogous to this in, in wild turkeys around the world or around the country. Like it just doesn't seem a thing turkeys would prey on. Yeah, but that was like one little test and they, they let them go. And it wound up being that we always talk about, well, you have like invasives which are bad, but it wound up being like, it's like a species of no known negative. It's like no, no negative. But the climate's changed so much you might not get away with that. What they were doing with turkeys in the 70s, 80s, early 90s. You might not today be able to go into, I'm not trying to pick on California today. Might not be able to go into California and say, hey, we're going to turn some wild turkeys loose.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, like the cultural climate change, you.

[Phil]

Know, I mean like you might hit resistance for something that was just, that happened. Because if you look at like the shift too, in the 50s, they brought audad into Texas, they brought ibex into New Mexico, they bought oryx into New Mexico. And there was kind of a, let's just see what happens. Like they can't be bad attitude that's, that's built up resistance. And now even when people look like with elk, we've only recovered elk on 14% of his 20% of historic range. 14% of historic range just kind of mind boggling. And that recovery effort is ground to a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just there's a less of an appetite to move cervids from one area to another because like disease transmission. So it is in the conversation about will we get to a place where we're actually trying to do this. It's like the appetite seems to be just generally declining to like any kind of dice rolling.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, yeah, I think, you know, there is a certain aspect of this that is, you know better and you do better. Right. So we know that these animals, you know, a foreign animal or an invasive animal would have certain impacts on an ecosystem. So that is important that we have take that precautionary approach because now we know better, so we must do better. However, I think the pendulum swung all the way where now it's, you know, any change is bad. And right now if we do anything, if we try to change anything about the status quo, there are things we cannot account for yet. Therefore we should not take that step. And so we've moved into this fear based decision making which is grinding recovery to a halt of a lot of species.

[Phil]

Like I just mentioned with elk.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to sort of. The pendulum needs to come back to the center. I think, you know, in most things in life, this moderate approach is probably the best approach. So how can we make the most informed decision while also having a certain appetite for risk with this idea that without risk there is no chance for a win out there? Right. We need to take certain risks in order to recover species.

[Matt James]

You mentioned earlier that you didn't care for the reporting by Washington Post and Cowboy State Daily, who did a good job of covering the story.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we had a lot of great folks. I mean, obviously we were blown away that we got the COVID of Time magazine and Time did a great job. Jeff. Jeff Pluger. He did this great article on the whole thing. The New Yorker broke our embargo and published the story early. So although we're mad at them, if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

[Matt James]

Did they know they were breaking it?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, they did. There's, you know, there's. I'll just put it this way. There's some emails going back and forth saying, can we do this? We said no, and then they did it anyways. So that was heartbreaking because there's so, you know, there's 175 people at Colossal that we're working their tails off to do this thing. Our marketing team was killing themselves. Our PR teams were killing themselves. To have this really ambitious launch event and then for somebody to selfishly try to go first was really frustrating. But despite all of that, New Yorker read a pretty cool piece now that said he gave me like the dumbest quote ever in that thing, so I'm a little upset about it.

[Phil]

He gave you a bad quote?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, well, you know, I was, I was out of the, the country when he was visiting, so I was zooming into a few calls and he was interviewing me over zoom, and I just didn't have a lot of time. He basically said, what do you do here? I'm Chief Animal Officer. It's not a title. People really know what the hell it means. I'm not sure I know what it means.

[Angela Perry]

It's like you're a zookeeper or something.

[Steve Rinella]

Chief Zookeeper. One of my guys on my team calls me the Chief Pet Officer. So I just told him I play with animals. Just joking. Of course, that's the one thing he.

[Phil]

Publishes then you look cocky and you look cocky.

[Steve Rinella]

So I wasn't thrilled with that. I was like, there's a lot of thought that goes to what I do. Right? But. But it was fine. But yeah, I think there was the vast majority, I'd say 95% of the, of the things that were published I thought were fair, balanced, shed a positive light on what we were doing. Five percent of them were hyper negative to as like almost just for the purpose of clickbait.

[Phil]

Yeah, well, I mean you have to acknowledge that there's a real stirring of the pot. Yeah, yeah, I mean you're stirring the pot.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what I like about it. I think the conservation pot needs to be stirred. Yeah, like I said, I think we've gone to this fear based approach where you know, in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at the, we're at the third point where we said, you know, the worst, we're doing the worst thing which is we're not making decisions.

[Angela Perry]

But do you guys feel an urgency to, you're not going to stop messing around with ancient extinct species but do you feel an urgency to like do something like more timely like with a.

[Steve Rinella]

BC that, that is like, I mean the American red wolf is a good example of how what exactly what we're doing. But the foundation, the colossal foundation has 45 conservation partners. That's 45 separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation. Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock the language of wolves right here in Yellowstone? Working with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, Yellowstone Forever, Jeff Reed and the Grizzly Systems team, trying to unlock language in a way that we can track wolves over space and time without requiring collars and understand what are they talking about. To conferring resistance to toxins from invasive species. The northern quoll from the Northern Territory of Australia is being decimated because one of the animals it predates on is the invasive cane toad which has a bufo toxin. That neurotoxin kills the cane, the quoll when they eat them. So we've actually found one base pair change that. Animals that co evolved with the cane toad in South America have evolved that. So we're changing that one base pair in qual and we've already shown in the lab that it confers resistance to bufotoxin. So now we can give that to the government of Australia and say here is you know, a tool for you guys to recover your northern coal. And as a bonus they'll eat all those cane toads that are invasive and are sort of one of the most famous examples of an invasive species. We also created a vaccine to help elephants with one of the most deadly viruses they face the elephant endotheliotropic herpes Virus which kills about 30% of elephants in human care. And more and more we understand that is decimating wild populations. So you know we have 45 of these projects ongoing. Obviously what makes it to the top of that of the storyline is always de extinction. But that's the power of de extinction is it does bring awareness, it brings attention, it brings funding. $450 million we've raised over four years to support the business of Colossal and we've raised another $75 million for the colossal Foundation. So you know, we talk about conservation as an under resourced fight. We're bringing resources to the table. These are not a distraction of resources from places where you know, you would have normally given money to wwf. Now we're going to Silicon Valley, we're going to capital, you know, venture capital investors.

[Phil]

And what are they getting though? Like what in the end? Because you're not a non profit, you're not an environmental.

[Steve Rinella]

We have a non profit.

[Phil]

Yeah, you have, oh not there's a foundation but then there's a for profit component. What in the end what is the product?

[Steve Rinella]

The product is the all of the technology we're creating. So it's more about process, less about product.

[Phil]

Product.

[Steve Rinella]

We're creating processes that then we can license that IP to other fields of science. Human healthcare research, you know, university research, things like that. We've already spun out two companies out of Colossal that are now standalone businesses, self sufficient businesses. One is a computational biology platform. So it's an AI tool that essentially helps you compare genes of animals and understand this gene codes for this trait.

[Phil]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

That type of thing.

[Phil]

Clients being universities and research facilities.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly.

[Phil]

I got you.

[Steve Rinella]

Another one is a plastics degradation company. So we've identified a microbe that's able to consume almost every plastic we've ever thrown at it. Everything from really soft plastics to very hard high density plastics. And we're using genetic engineering to try to enhance those types of qualities. And so this gives us a new tool in the way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle them into smaller pieces of plastic. Microplastic. This is breaking down the molecular bonds of this. So that's sort of what we're doing is we're this incubator of technology that we can spin out and it funds the whole program.

[Matt James]

You know I've seen how raptor recovery centers, when they're feeding like an eagle chick or a hawk chick, they'll cover themselves in a bed sheet and they'll put like a puppet on their hand to Feed the chicks to prevent human imprinting.

[Phil]

And then what kind of little chick.

[Matt James]

What kind of protocols do you guys have about dealing with your three dire wolves? Like, how many humans have they seen?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, they've probably seen say 15 or 20. Okay. But they see four or five on a regular basis. These are not candidates for release into the wild. So we take a slightly different approach. Right. If we're creating a stable population of captive animals that could eventually go back into the wild, which is not the case with the direwolves, but with the red wolves that we cloned, you know, this generation is not a candidate for rewilding. We'll begin to take a more hands off approach as you create subsequent generations and model after very similar projects that are already going on with red wolf release into North Carolina, Carolina, Mexican gray wolf into the American Southwest. So mammals are a little different. They don't imprint the way birds do. Birds have a very strong imprint potential. So it's, you can really mess a chick up if, if it imprints on a human. Whereas with the mammals, they don't take that same level of habituation.

[Angela Perry]

There's a certain degree of like learned behavior too.

[Phil]

Right.

[Angela Perry]

Like, wolves need to be taught how to hunt by their pack.

[Steve Rinella]

And so there's a lot of opportunity for cross fostering. So you know, you can create puppies that then you would drop into dens of wild wolves if you wanted to, like say this was a gray wolf project. As you know, the, the pack leaves the den for a bit, you can go and drop puppies in. And that's called cross fostering. So we could do that drop bunch.

[Phil]

There because some are going to get at 100%.

[Angela Perry]

But, but as far as like, you'd never, you would never be able to get to a situation where you would have real like die rolls, teaching die rolls how to be direwolves.

[Phil]

You know that's impossible.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible. Generations to get to. But you first have to know what.

[Phil]

There'S no way to find out.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I mean, this kind of goes back to some of the debate that, you know, I thought people were going to say you made a direwolf. What the hell, this thing's an enormous hyper carnivore. And really what they were going, well, that's not a direwolf. Well, if you're so sure that's not a direwolf, can you please tell me what a direwolf is? Because if you can't tell me definitively what it is you can't tell me what it isn't. There's a lot of nuance to taxonomy and we don't know how transgenics fall into taxonomy. Taxonomy wasn't built with this idea that suddenly along the evolutionary tree something just pops up, up on its own branch.

[Phil]

Yeah, right.

[Steve Rinella]

So transgenics really challenged taxonomic classification. So, you know, we're trying to help the world cope with that. We're trying to challenge taxonomists to figure out, because transgenics are not going to stop a direwolf. They won't stop with colossal. They're synthetic. Biology is now a tool that conservation can use to cover number of animals, a number of species issues. There will be the use of one gene from one animal put into another animal and then they go, well, how do you now classify that animal? You know, taxonomy wasn't built to handle that.

[Phil]

But. And the thing in the behavior thing though, this isn't the hack on it, but I'm saying like, you just, you might get where you can win the debate and say like, based on an agreed upon definition, this is a dire wolf. But the problem is when you, if you say like behaviorally, there's no foundation for it.

[Steve Rinella]

We can't say definitively. No, you would never know what the animal was doing. We haven't studied it. I mean, there's how many species across the world that are alive today that we don't know behaviorally what they do, what is their function within the ecosystem, you know, so it's, it's a valid point and it's one that it will challenge de extinction as we go forward. But I don't think it's a reason to not pursue de extinction.

[Matt James]

Has there been anything with their behavior that really surprises the people who watch them? Like they never howl or, boy, they sure like digging holes.

[Steve Rinella]

They love sticks. Oh, big fans of sticks.

[Matt James]

Like wolf puppies love sticks. I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I mean, I don't think they get a lot of sticks. Okay, we'll have to see McIntyre carrying bones around.

[Angela Perry]

Do you guys like go in there and cuddle with them or will they rip your arm off, stick it through a fence?

[Steve Rinella]

There's no cuddling at this point. Yeah, we were pretty specific early on, contact was only what was required for the care and health of the animal. Now contact is basically not required. We'll drive in in order to drop feed and things like that. They also have an indoor building that they have access to and sort of a smaller pen where they, we can coax them into that. So that we can do some basic management stuff. If we ever had to, you know, anesthetize an animal because it was sick or injured, we use these areas. So there is some habituation to those areas because it's a management advantage for us to be able to not have to go out there and dart one.

[Matt James]

So what about their behavior has surprised you though?

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know. It's so early, it's hard to say. Right. Because they were just really goofy puppies that were, that were around people and now they're really developing into their own. I think the level of, despite the habituation early on in their life, the level of flight distance that they still maintain with people outside of like two, two people on my team is pretty startling. Whereas I've worked with a lot of other captive wild canids and, and they are go, oh, person equals food. And they come running over. Right. These guys do not have that. There is a real fear of new people, new things. They how like yeah, they do. They, they have a good, how there's really, you know, famous video that we put on YouTube that was their first howl, which was pretty powerful moment for the team. You know, I was sitting there holding them in. One of the vet techs that works in the clinic we were giving, we were doing a checkup on him, was like singing a song, a little mermaid song. And there's a part where it's like. And she starts doing that and all of a sudden both boys just popped into a howl that was pretty, pretty incredible.

[Matt James]

Is their body size on track with what you'd expect the body size of a dire wolf to be?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, so we're, you know, fossil record kind of suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that 130, 140 pounds up to 160 pounds. I think we're on pace for 140 pounds. Where we stand today we're seven and a half months, just shy of 100 pounds as is their growth curve is definitely leveling out. But you know, what we know from gray wolves is we could expect them to continue to grow until they're about 12, 15 months and then from there they'll continue to put on weight. But they're, they're pretty tall leggy animals as they are today.

[Phil]

I'm excited for this ivory billed woodpecker situation.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, yeah, I mean we got to, we got to get you down to the lab and we can show you what we're doing with, with the woodpecker stuff.

[Matt James]

You know, who else wouldn't like it? Steve, are the people who claim they see them now because they kind of, they're like special.

[Steve Rinella]

We get that on the thylacine project too.

[Phil]

Oh no need. Yeah, there's one behind my own.

[Steve Rinella]

I had a, we were at a town hall meeting because we, we will visit Tasmania and have town halls and try to hear from, from the locals and we have at that thylacine stakeholder group and one of them said, you know I, this is 10 years ago. I was pumping gas down at this intersection. I saw one run by. It's like, I don't want to be rude but if they do exist I don't think they're visiting gas stations.

[Phil]

Yeah, yeah. Do you guys use that term Lazarus?

[Steve Rinella]

We haven't used it. Yeah but it's good, it's a good analogy.

[Phil]

I was going to get to this but we're running out of time. But crystal ball it on, crystal ball it on Tasmania saying hell yeah, let's cut some thy scenes loose.

[Steve Rinella]

I think the chances will go much higher once we have a thylacine in hand because I think they will suddenly be oh, this is a real thing that we need to be very serious about. Australia has a much, a very conservative approach to wildlife management.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And they've been burned.

[Phil]

Lord knows they don't have any non natives.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, they've been burned in the past. Right. Cane toads is a great example.

[Phil]

I can see that.

[Steve Rinella]

So I think there will be an onerous, onerous process in order to get there. But I would say yeah, you know, you know that sort of 75, 85% chance that they will definitely come along. I think Mauritius is much more willing to take that.

[Phil]

What was the percent chance on Tasmania?

[Steve Rinella]

75, 85 somewhere optimistic. I'm telling you once these animals are back I think we'll be tempting fighting people to say why is it in Texas in the United States and not in Tasmania?

[Phil]

Yeah. I love Willem Dafoe.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

One of the worst movies ever made.

[Steve Rinella]

Horrible movie.

[Phil]

His thylacine movie.

[Steve Rinella]

It's really bad.

[Phil]

Just the logic.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

It had magical backpack syndrome. Yep.

[Matt James]

What is that?

[Phil]

Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack.

[Matt James]

Oh.

[Phil]

All throughout the movie. Producing like all sorts of shit. It's like wow, it's like a Harry Potter bag.

[Steve Rinella]

They just keep pulling stuff out of.

[Phil]

It and it's just the logic. It was like a great. They're like we should do something or the idea is we should do something around Tasmanian tigers. And then that's just what came out in the end. Terrible.

[Matt James]

I love Willem Dafoe, I assume you.

[Phil]

Come on the show. I'd love to have them.

[Matt James]

I assume your company has competitors. Have they. Have they been excited for you guys? Have they been critical of what you've done? Are they like, damn, we thought we'd land on the moon first?

[Steve Rinella]

I think as far as I'm aware, we're the only de extinction species preservation.

[Matt James]

There's nobody else.

[Steve Rinella]

The only people we truly compete with would be other nation states. You know, Korea has pursued some of this stuff. We know China has an interest in it, but it's not really at a company level. Okay, I think you're good job security. I think you're about to see people come in, but they're about $450 million and five years late.

[Phil]

Are you guys constantly discouraged?

[Angela Perry]

Are you guys constantly getting like petitioned by people or. Or organizations about like their pet de extinction project or their pet project to prevent something from their animal?

[Steve Rinella]

You know what I mean? We get a lot of that where it's, you know, hey, thylacine is a really cool project, but did you consider about like the. The red pileated Northwest woodpecker, Right? It's like some random bird that you go, well, I didn't actually. Let me look it up. And you go, well, it's not really just extirpated from that area. It's still around. Yeah, right there. You get a lot of that type of stuff.

[Phil]

Dude. Thanks for coming on, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Hey, always great to be here.

[Phil]

You guys. Come on anytime you want.

[Steve Rinella]

I appreciate that because I'll take you up on that because, you know, we're working in Yellowstone a pretty regular basis now, so we're up in your neck of the woods.

[Matt James]

People aren't going to like to hear that.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't think it's not direwolf related.

[Phil]

Let me give you my end. Let me give you my end sentiment about the whole thing. I think there's things that happen in American culture, global culture, whatever. There's things that happen that make everyone dumber and there's things that happen to make everyone smarter. Right? This is definitely whatever ends up happening. Like whatever happens with Romulus and Remus and like, whatever happened, this made everybody smarter. Because everybody said, wow, I never really thought about what is a species, what is de extinction? How do you define a blank? Is this okay or not okay? Like, everyone got smarter and normally stuff happens, everybody gets dumber.

[Steve Rinella]

I love that I'm gonna steal that from you as well, because I think.

[Phil]

Trying to think of things that made.

[Steve Rinella]

Everybody dumber, this is net Positive. Well, I think.

[Matt James]

TikTok.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Everybody got dumber.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, people got a lot dumber. TikTok. Yeah. Net positive for the world. I think that's, you know, if we're boiling down the story, this is a net positive because no one got hurt. Nobody got hurt. We're injecting, you know, we're injecting science into pop culture. We're injecting conservation. We're, you know, if you look at Google search terms and hashtag trends from when we launched that first week, we saw all time highs of Google searches for red wolf, for conservation, for the term extinction.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, if we can push this into a dinner table conversation for families to have with their kids, talk about the biodiversity crisis, that is a win in and of itself.

[Phil]

Yeah, you did, but. And the other thing is, you didn't siphon off of limited federal spending. No, it was like willing seller, willing buyer, willing investor, willing investment.

[Steve Rinella]

Ben loves to say, we spared the world another shitty software company.

[Angela Perry]

I like that. I like that.

[Phil]

Yeah, it's a pot stirrer, dude. But it made everybody smarter.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly.

[Phil]

No, I like. I like it. It's like a real mental. It causes a lot of mental wrestling.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

You know, what was that quote we had recently? That's the last thing I'm gonna say, but it's not really applicable here. But I think we're talking to Dan Flores. No, it's a great quote, what Dan Flores was saying about historians. He goes, the reason the arguments are so. The reason it's like, the reason the arguments are so vicious is there's nothing at stake. But he was just making a joke about his own discipline as a historian, you know, like, how could people get so worked up about Clovis first or whatever. Right. But there's something at stake here. But I think the main thing is it's like not the main thing. It's just fun to watch.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I appreciate that.

[Phil]

It's fun to watch people like all of a sudden arguing about stuff that the day before they didn't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it's perfect.

[Angela Perry]

You guys should do an Irish elk next.

[Steve Rinella]

I won't tell you. We're not going to do an Irishman.

[Angela Perry]

Hunters would love that. Direwolves could eat them.

[Steve Rinella]

It works for me.

[Phil]

He's got the amusement park figured out. All right, thanks, man. I really appreciate you coming.

[Steve Rinella]

Thank you so much.

[Dan Flores]

Steve Rinella here. The American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the west, unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way.

[Dr. Randall]

This is an iHeart podcast.