Will most likely have a real life Jurassic Park in the next 20 years
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The Dire Wolf has been Recreated
- Thread starter Dr. Cheese
- Start date
As a guy with an currently incurable genetic condition, I'm all for research in the field of DNA manipulation. The same CRISPR tech was on the cusp of using a person's own white blood cells to target solid tumors in cancer patients until funding was recently pulled.
That would make one h******a ham sandwich!
and still hasn't been built 8 years later!!Lotta good that will do. The brick house will take twice as long, and cost four times as much.
It will probably Pleistocene Park because they can get plenty of DNA from all of those frozen critters in Siberia with the permafrost thawing.
I have hope that funding for this and other worthy, crucial, projects might resume soon. It’s only a thin thread of hope but that’s more than I had a few days ago.
As for the Dire Wolf, I have not read anything other than the press releases, which surely are full of scientific holes, but even with the obvious caveats I am very impressed. I think that most species that have become extinct did so because the environment they were adapted to ceased to exist, so reviving such an extinct species just leaves us with a living artifact. And that might be important in itself. But some were hunted or fished to extinction, and maybe some of those could be reintroduced to everyone’s benefit? Just speculating…
Also worth noting: Dire "wolves" were dogs:
Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, New Genetic Clues Reveal
The extinct giant canids were a remarkable example of convergent evolutionwww.scientificamerican.com
How Wolf Became Dog
Scientists are racing to solve the enduring mystery of how a large, dangerous carnivore evolved into our best friend
It was a wolf first. So were all other dogs….
In my class today which focuses on these type of ethics, we actually talked about this.
I hate to say I just do not see the point, they didn't plan post dire wolf creation, everyone in my class discuss what the hell are they gonna do with them, what is their goal... they died and went extinct for a reason they were an ice age creature who failed to evolved and adapt to the future climate of Earth afterwards...
It's still cool but that is just my opinion.
I hate to say I just do not see the point, they didn't plan post dire wolf creation, everyone in my class discuss what the hell are they gonna do with them, what is their goal... they died and went extinct for a reason they were an ice age creature who failed to evolved and adapt to the future climate of Earth afterwards...
It's still cool but that is just my opinion.
In related news, Meltdown Man, a hominid species previously thought to be a hoax, has been found to exist in viable form.
Once again, the key to the discovery was the detailed study of a jawbone.
But rather than in Sussex, this specimen was located in Cenozoic lowlands near the Delmarva Plain.
Once again, the key to the discovery was the detailed study of a jawbone.
But rather than in Sussex, this specimen was located in Cenozoic lowlands near the Delmarva Plain.
Wolves were wolves first. Dogs came later. The point of the article is that the Dire "wolf" was in that later group. It was a big dog, sure, but genetically, a dog nonetheless. From the Scientific American article I linked earlier:
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Preliminary genetic analyses indicated that dire and gray wolves were not close relatives.
After sequencing five genomes from dire wolf fossils between 50,000 and 13,000 years old, the researchers found that the animals belonged to a much older lineage of dogs. Dire wolves, it now appeared, had evolved in the Americas and had no close kinship with the gray wolves from Eurasia; the last time gray wolves and dire wolves shared a common ancestor was about 5.7 million years ago.
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Of course, there are tons of people who like to project their personal values and fantastical aspirations onto their pets, in hopes that it reflects back upon them in some self-mythologizing fashion, but fortunately, science isn't obliged to suffer from that kind of ego-driven delusion.
And if we want to be really up-to-the-minute on actual scientific coverage, here's today's writeup from SciAm on the current developments, and their dubious nature:
The Dire Wolf Isn’t Back—But Here’s What ‘De-Extinction’ Tech Can Actually Do
Colossal Bioscience says it has “de-extincted” the dire wolf, but other scientists disagree and say more important conservation science is being lost in all the hype
How Wolf Became Dog
Scientists are racing to solve the enduring mystery of how a large, dangerous carnivore evolved into our best friend
It was a wolf first. So were all other dogs….
No, Dire Wolves look like wolves, but are genetically different. It's like Snow Leopards aren't really leopards.
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