The cost of one revived direwolf puppy from "Game of Thrones" was valued at $15 million (6 photos)

But there is a nuance: the geneticist suspects that his colleagues have blown the sensation out of proportion and that there was no “revival” of long-extinct animals.





A couple of days ago, the media was abuzz with news that scientists from the Colossal Biosciences company had brought an extinct species back to life. And such interest in it arose because the animal appeared in the famous novel by George Martin, “Game of Thrones.” In the film adaptation of the books, the direwolf was effectively enlarged and made into a creature of simply unrealistic size. A pack of such an animal could have taken down a Tyrannosaurus.



This is the "Terrible Wolf" (Canis dirus) - it terrorized North and South America approximately 125,000-9,500 years ago. And then it disappeared due to climate change and the mass extinction of large herbivores that it hunted. It differed from modern gray wolves in its body length - up to 180 cm, and its weight under a hundred kilograms.

And now it has appeared again, but in the depths of an American laboratory. The researchers spent a long time fiddling with the genome extracted from the remains of the extinct predator, and crossed it with the genes of the gray wolf, then artificially grew embryos from it and implanted them into surrogate mothers. A couple of months later, puppies were born.





There were three of them in total, all of them survived. Later, the writer George Martin introduced them to the world. And he wrote on his social networks: "The direwolf is back."



The Internet immediately began to wonder - how much could such a wolf cub cost? The breeder, selector and author of the breed group "Wulfhund" Yulia Ivanovich answered this. In her opinion, we are talking about a scientific experiment and mass breeding of such predators is currently impossible - it is prohibitively expensive.

And if someone still wants to buy a puppy - let them prepare big money:

The cost of any animal from this program that has gone through the crisis age of infancy, theoretically could reach at least $15 million.

Well, the head of the epigenetics laboratory of the Institute of Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Sergei Kiselev, believes that the Americans were a little hasty with this sensation. They really did breed wolves, but not the "Terrible" ones.

In fact, no one revived anyone, no revival of the dire wolf has happened now. They just made a transgenic gray wolf. Of the 20 thousand genes that the gray wolf has, only a dozen and a half genes were corrected. Another thing is if the entire genome was replaced, then some ancient species would really have appeared.



At the same time, the scientist advised not to wait for the revival of dinosaurs:

So far, the same company Colossal Biosciences has not succeeded with the dodo bird, and dinosaurs are birds, they are closer to a chicken than to a lizard. Such technologies have not yet been tested on birds and do not work.

Probably, it is still too early to shell out 15 million dollars for an ordinary gray wolf, only repainted white. Even if George Martin advertises it. If anything, he sponsored part of the research of these scientists from the American startup.