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

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

Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything.

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, everybody hot, damn.

It's first episode is doctor Renela.

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.

My daughter teases my ears. With that hat on? Do you know what 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. Notice that you've got an octagon going You get a different You get a.

Taking photos of Steve with his diploma.

Hey man, you guys, just is there a tier above that of other hands?

No?

I think that's the top half.

Okay, it's like Pope after that.

I don't know that they make a better.

Hat than that.

Where'd you put that diploma?

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

Baseball here, it's just a mod that's a prop.

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 is the tassel.

Go on a certain side.

It's pinned. Oh, it's pinned in place. M a couple of things. You guys think it's all like. You guys think it's all grave. You haven't that happen to you. Well, I'll tell you something, something you might not realize. So you go up.

You go up.

It's in the it's in the arena, you know, like one hundreds, like six hundred and fifty students, all their parents. You march up and the seat they give you is right by the right in the line of action.

Mm hmmm.

And it's televised.

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 six hundred and fifty diplomas. But you're on the camera is aimed in such a way that you're there.

Not doing anything.

They've warned you, don't fiddle around, don't look at your phone.

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

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

How long did that take?

A couple hours?

Yeah?

Yeah, So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony.

They split the schools.

Which one were you?

I was in the morning.

Sce Is that one more prime time?

I don't think that anybody looks at it that way. They split the schools. So my honorary doctor was from the School of Forestry and Conservation. 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, I'm going to land management agencies. It's stressful.

A doctorate in an area outside of your your area of expertise.

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. The fact I went and had I went and did like a Q and A with the forestry students who have a lot of considerations around conservation funding and other issues. So I don't think they mean that I'm like as good as Seth as telling what trees are what right.

Jean Seth was in forestry school.

There's a test where you have to identify a hundred and some trees by the bud, not the leaf a stick.

Bet you Doug Dern could do that.

Yeah, he's pretty good. So they were doing a podcast on something hardly anyone know about except for people who listen to this show. This is old subject for people who listen to the show, but other than that, everybody found out about them from Game of Thrones.

Dire Wolves.

This is our current estimate. Is this to be our second and a half episode on this subject.

Yeah, because we had a first one.

We had a first one which was episode four six six, which was called dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, which was with Doctor Angela Perry.

That was number one, and then our half one half one, touching on it with today's guest.

With today's guest Matt James from Colossal Bioscience, as we touched on dire wolves, so there's one point five. At the conclusion of today's episode, the count will be up to two point five. If you 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 everywhere on the planet that you

Certainly a framing coming home from my ascendency.

We drive all the way home and I'm pulling into my you know, like not my driveway, but our circle 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 baby. 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 he carried at the same time, mm just standing in the road,

I know where this is going.

Well, I make my older boy dispatch the I make him kill the one that isn't going to survive. He use his boots, but his fingers. Then my daughter goes around everywhere trying to find a robin ness to put the egg in.

And I'm telling you it what works. It's cracked.

And then she's getting upset and more upset and can't find a nest. I said, but I want to return to what I telling you. It'll never live. It's cracked, so now is living in it's buried, no garden. I thought it was gonna's nutrients will return.

I thought this was like, you're gonna put it under like a pen picture.

She was, she was, She's like, I know, it's expensive, we need to get in. I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked. Like there's nothing you're gonna do. You're gonna put it so it's returning to the earth. In fact, it's gonna turn into raspberries. No, it's it's actually where it's positioned, it will be an acorn squash.

We've got.

You've got to rob a nest up under our portrait 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 going to eat them.

This is just gonna happen.

Well yeah, I mean, what am I gonna do?

Mo the whole nest? No? I would be smart. 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 near the egg as abandoned or something. You remember when we had you know, the whole thing if you touch a fawn, remember we had Randall Kaufman and Matt from Keith or montef He's like, well, that's true. None of our colloring 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, uh, probably I was raised to believe it's.

A good assumption to operate under.

That's what I was telling my daughter to 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 the manipulating you into not they're manipulating you into not messing with things you shouldn't mess with. Two book thing News is one forever for those of you awaiting it. Our guide to wilderness skills and survivals out in Japanese.

How many other languages don't know?

I'm not sure of any of the life.

I don't think any other.

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

But you, being you know, a.

Little adjacent to.

You know, here we go significantly Chinese, perhaps you can help me with something.

Yep, there are there are some kanji. Uh, there's there's Yes, there are some script characters that are similar. But I long long forgot how.

In China do they read books backwards or forwards?

So traditionally it's compared to us backwards, and it's not backwards, right, it's not backwards to them, and let's be friends.

I'm looking at this from American right to left.

If I'm not mistaken, right, I think that's what it is traditionally.

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. 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 supposed to go back to what would be for us,

It, but they because it's more modern now.

So you might if you lived in Japan, you might grab a book and you might encounter a book that has read from 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.

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

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

I thought that was a bootleg copy.

I saw it.

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

I thought that too. I also thought this version was prettier than that's a gorgeous cover.

Yeah what what didn't the American one?

Americans aren't that.

Americans aren't that discrete.

As well, 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 wrap box maybe with wrapping paper around it, as you know, presentation as a reflection of respect and of mil and so.

It's not ell that. It's like it's three times the pack international business.

Yeah, three 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 soft bound.

Book another paper But oh, you know, I had a joke I liked a lot and when I put that Japanese book on Instagram, and I said, if this book would have come out in nineteen forty we'd still be fighting in the Pacific.

That was pretty funny, get it, That's pretty funny.

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

Yep.

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

Or if you have a kid that trashed the hardcover.

Now there's every kid in America should deserve a soft cover too.

Let there's no kids that are that bad.

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

And then ideally turn it loose.

Well, I don't mean just the fact that they'll, Yeah, you know, that's why I let my kids tell them grab my mouse, You're probably gonna grab. It's doing a.

Lot of spiders.

We have an Iraq noophobia problem.

But I've accepted that it's true.

It's not just I think it's a psychological like. I think it's a legitimate psychological thing, the Iraq and noophobia. Now, this is harrowing. In Florida, a sixty one year old woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida. They went over they passed over an eleven foot alligator. It's it seems like it's spooked and that's the noise of it spooking in shallow water, flipped the canoe and then decided and then killed the woman Tiger Creek near Lake Kassimi, south of Orlando.

How harrowing be a rough way to go? I think be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly.

Bear her husband? How hairing for her husband? Oh way worse than getting killed by grizzly bear. There's just not a lot of romance in now.

No hopefully drowned first, I guess.

Yeah. Just the question is is.

Are more people getting killed by alligators these days and in days past.

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 Pancrats on the show, and well, there's there's there's so like, so grizzly bears dust off, Like, that's that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a

We're a run in with a human to begin with, and you look at human populations.

Yeah, but the thing but what I'm getting at is like a bear today, a grizzly today in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, a grizzy today an individual bear is not that bear is not more likely to maul a person. No, it's not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them. Ye, So if you went point me, if you went and looked at Florida, like you know, alligators were had endangered species protections in the seventies. Now they got one point five million.

Golf course ponds and canals in people's backyards.

So don't Yeah, it's not like gators are 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 alligator, an individual alligator still has a point oh whatever percent chance of doing it, and an individual alligator is not like more likely to attack a person, but you just have more opportunities. But

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?

I think Spencer is checking up on that. But in March, this same area where this woman got was killed, another woman was killed brilliantly. Yeah in March.

Same Did that one have something to do with a dog rescuing a.

Dog or something?

Oh, yeah, there's something about a dog.

Because yeah, eighteen hundred grizzly bears and the lower forty eight eighteen hundred grizzly bears kill a couple people a year, so and so they're more dangerous per bear than gators.

If you have one thousand gators.

Yeah, but the other thing is you got tons of dinky gators that you can't really count.

You have to start counting them out a certain size.

I guess Since nineteen forty eight, there have been four hundred and fifty documented alligator bites in Florida. Thirty of them were fatal. It's a eighty years seven years span.

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

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.

The gator nuggets are really good.

Yeah, I've had friends give me sax a gator me.

I just have never like.

Planned it, you know what I mean? This got us thinking about this. Did you know that there used to be it's so crazy and eleven thousand pound alligator?

You mean used to be like ten years ago, like ten million years.

Ago, seventy eighty million years ago.

My colossal probably doesn't want to work on this.

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

Six to eight foot long, teeth.

Six to eight inch long?

What am I saying that would be? But do you maybe mean inches? Yeah? Yeah, that's right, six to eight inch teeth. There's a picture of one eating. There's like a like a fanciful.

Painting of an artist rendering.

Oh yeah, but it's like it's not an actual photo.

R a t rex, which I love.

Yeah, you know what I mean.

But you can't rule out an eleven thousand pounder.

Uh. They found the bones from one in North Carolina in eighteen fifty how long, I don't know.

I mean, that's an alligator the size of an orca gown with.

Your kid, and they nudging up to the edge of the pond.

And the head would be the size of this table.

Mm hmmm.

You'd seen 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. 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. Uh quick? How many other news items we get?

It's even bigger than an orca.

This is an interesting deal because we had a wildlife We had a retired US 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 panglin scales and elephant ivory, related to a Chinese encyclopedia of medicine having said perhaps there is no health benefit to panglin scales, I love it and ivory.

How was the eye every tied to medicine?

I don't know.

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

In twenty nineteen, 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 twenty twenty, Panglin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine.

We found out why.

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

Sure, now do you just like rub a piece of ivory on your face?

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

My wife was getting off her toxins out last week, she did a cleanse, and I was like, what toxins specifically, the same way anybody answers it. They don't know what? Tell me what toxins are coming out of you?

Pepass which we can't get out of us.

I had a social media hissy fit.

When and when uh, the Trump administration canceled some federal spending on the lamp ray 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, which surprised me, is they've now working with

Do?

I mean?

The current thinking the only way to figure that out is let them get in there, right, Like what you don't? I mean, that could be devastating to the Great Lakes.

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.

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

I liked everything. Yeah, all right, we're gonna do a little background on dire wolves here.

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

Never I'm aware of it, have you?

Yes?

But I wanted your review on it.

Never watched it, Okay, I watched serial drama like it. I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like.

Did you watch Narcos?

Oh?

Wait, Narcos?

And then what's that?

There wasn't there a Danish serial dramas.

Fantasy stuff other than Star Wars.

A little bit of Star the Star Wars guy, a little bit of 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 Danish drama and.

There's no date yet, okay, d Narcos, Yes, that's it.

Oh there's another one, push your one, Pushura or something. An Italian an Italian series. I did watch that, Tina.

No Gomora well, because Gomora was a book, was a nonfiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came a film called Gomorra, which was a devastating film about the Italian mafia. And then out of that so I watched because I was liking Gomore of the book, Gamore of the movie. I watched some of the Gomora the series. What I not that it matters. What I don't like about serial dramas is after a while, I want to get out with my life.

Did you watch Breaking Bad?

Can you?

I've got the top five here. See if you've seen any TV dramas of all time from the University of Pennsylvania and the Sopranos. No The Wire, no Breaking Bad, Mad Men, no Game of Thrones. Okay five, I trust you now.

I'm not hacking on it.

I just can't sure.

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, getting extra season or two of yeah it is, Oh brother, you know you can just smell them keeping it jump the shark. Yeah.

Well.

The good news about Game of Thrones is it wasn't that they were struggling to keep it going as they were struggling to condense it into what they did. Oh, because the books are just so the books kept it going for them.

Oh, interesting thing here just about wolves in general. So the two dire wolves were 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, Well, we were.

Hoping nobody wolves are hipped to frat.

Sorry, yeah, exactly, it was fitting and plus the you know race by a she wolf and h.

There's a statue in in sus Saint Marie Michigan of Romulus and Remus suckling from the mother's the wolves teats.

Ye, do you feel like rolling pictures for the video audiences.

There on the little.

You want to start with the then adults? I mean they're now what Matt, you said, seven.

And a half at seven point five months old, and they're tipping the scales nearly your past.

Their little white fluffy pops.

Cute. Uh let me let me kick off a little bit. Despite characters like that Game of Thrones are supposed to be up north, right, it is a fictional Uh yeah, it's like show in Canada.

It's a whole world. So there's like up north stuff and.

Down the family associated with dire Wolves. They're in the north.

Yes, despite because in my thing I have here. I wrote this like, despite characteristics otherwise, dire wolves were Southern animals. They ranged throughout the lower forty eight. They liked the south and the hot so much that four thousand died in La Have I told my story eighteen times about my first date with my wife twenty Okay, yeah, at least there were dire wolves in Mexico. There were dire wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of

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

That's not true.

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

We've debated that and we haven't even talked about it with our multiple people.

But the one guy who debated it said that they weren't found at the Lebrea tar pits.

Who said that Angela Perry.

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

We talked about that with the old person.

Yeah, we didn't, and we did. I could probably find it's.

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

When we can come back to this.

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

They're definitely in lebre A lot of them, A lot of them.

I have to tell my story about my first date and.

My wife all over.

I know, I know.

Oh, do you mean seem to have like Jack Carr? No, I'm not, Jack said not. Sorry, we can visit this.

I will find it.

We know there'ner.

No Jack Corner. He was on the show Big Dinosaur Guy. Spencer was talking about.

John Corner is composed.

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

I think that's directionally accurate.

If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray wolf skull and you take fifteen measurements on it, this is a good little tidbit. Four of those measurements are different. I'd like to know what 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

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.

And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome. Okay, right, So when you say ninety nine point five percent, you're still looking at point five percent of three billion base pairs.

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

And the percentage thing can be is one way to explain it is a hard way to conceptualize it, because at the same time, you could say African elephant and an Asian elephant are early ninety eight percent similar.

Oh well, because I was just going to point out that according and people debate these counts humans and chimpanzees ninety eight point eight percent similar m.

And I think an important part of 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, you know, musculature, hair, some pretty significant differences, so that that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't

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 areaying that's not really a good way of looking at it.

I've seen a few people that look like a carrot was. Do you know.

The form of former his genetics similarity might be like sixty one percent sixty.

Okay, explain that point five percent? Like it like to you, Matt, explain that if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf, and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire wolf for ninety nine point five percent similar, what is the point five and is it accurate to go and look and say, like, I'll think 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,

Or is that a dumb way to look at it?

I mean, we're waiting into dangerous territory. Because I'm more a conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a geneticis at back home, right. I work with really some people like Beth who really explain these things really well. But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to say two hundred and forty genes separate us from a chimpanzee.

How do you decide look at.

Let's look at color? Why white?

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 know when you talk about

But did you guys tweak it to make it white? No, So it's because 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.

Yep, well he made one of them white.

Like for the show.

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 or coat colors.

So but when it was born, you didn't know what color would be, knew it?

Okay, Yeah, we already knew because we had made that change.

So so you had like purposefully made it white.

Yes, Okay, So when we identified that definitely over this sixty thousand years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution between Ohio and Idaho, both animals coated for a very light colored coat as compared to what we would have seen in a gray wolf.

Like perhaps it was like kyot colored.

Could have been. Yeah, it could have been where it could be even lighter like this white we saw.

We said, mountain pale if you look over your shoulder.

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 between across space and time and these two specimens We said, well, that's certainly interesting. We only have two sequences, so that means one hundred percent of what we sampled, you know, had this coat color.

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

The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when we've seen that trait in the in a gray wolf, like did it a naturally occur? It isn't naturally occurring. It would be closely associated with.

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

Yeah, exactly have that those issues. So we made a decision.

We said, well, so that's that's not something that was found out. That's not something that people found out by trying to insert that into.

Now that's just from people that had studied Kana genetics across Yeah, across that.

I didn't understand. I was like, because I was like, that would be a lot of experimentation to real exactly.

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 twenty edits across fifteen genes with fifteen specific diabolf variants. I mean, there are five variants that we edited for that were

But it's why is that not a good way looking at it?

Well, just the variation between two individuals like you and I have a significant variation. We're not one hundred percent identical. So if aliens came and abducted you and I, right, they would not then go and clone a human and make current 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.

The one's got an honorary doctorate.

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

Yeah, so did.

You probably have a legit one right?

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

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, that you're able to pluck some living thing out of a dire wolf bone and like add it into something. It's more like you're looking at trying to think of it like a 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 think that's pretty good analogy. I might use it later too. It's good.

Yeah, let me refine it for a day.

A doctor should have a more refined The way I.

Think about it is when we seek it's ancient DNA, which is what best specialty is. Right when we go in, what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a two 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 two billion puzzle pieces and we have to figure out how to put

So let me hate you with this one. Let's say you took one of you took one of your animals Romulus or Remus, and you uh have them forbid something were to happen to it, and you boiled its skull down and cleaned it up and threw it into.

A pile of la Brea tar pits.

Right.

Yeah, 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 in the dire wolf pile.

That's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way. I would do it in a much less uh fatalistic way. I would. We can use uh you know, high tech CT image in an actually three D print their skeleton, which is one of the things we will be doing is as a 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.

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

Yeah? The diurbl farians we picked were specific to changes that we knew would be associated with those few morphological differences between the species, 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're talking about dogs, mingol this is one and reading all the coverage about your projects, why did the dogs get Why did the dog that birth?

Why was it a cesarean section?

Well, so it's a good question. I So one of the things we did is while we were starting this project, I, me and my team we put together this one hundred and sixty page document that is the Animal Care Manual of the Direwolf. Right, so we wrote an animal care and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with. That's twelve thousand years extinct, super fun project. In there, we had very specific uh protocols for how would we

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?

It was like, well read, embryology is the numbers game. If you've you know, know anybody it's gone through IVF, you know years ago that used to put multiple embryos into into a mom. The same idea with us is when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know, twenty five embryos understanding that only two to six of those would take, and in our case we got two

Will the dire wolves be fertile?

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, our interest is not in breeding at the moment, but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive management of you know, time in when the female is with the pack or outside of the pack.

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

The manual or the dire the manual?

I'm ment well both, but I'm I'm let's settle for a manual.

The really cool thing is we published the manuals on our website. So if you go to the fossil dot com fors dire Well f you'll see there is a downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the partuition issues. So how do you take care of a 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

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

So the dog did nurse them for the first few days, and so Romulus and Remus there 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 and starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we just said, you know, it's similar to the precautionary approach we took with cesarean section. We said, we're gonna pull

Where's that dog. Now, that'd be a valuable dog.

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

Become a famous little like a famous little donor dog.

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.

Whoever has it doesn't know.

They has no.

Idea what that whoa They don't know correct, nobody knows. I don't know where they are and the home doesn't know.

Someday, that dog this is gonna do like a lot of people do, where they start getting like I need to find on my real parent. It's gonna look for its incredible Disney movie. It's trying to find its children. I'll be quite surprised when it finds them. You're so big and white. What kind of dog was this?

You probably want to.

Say, this is give it up. Yeah, it was.

It was. It was a mutt, right, it was. It was. It was a large hound that was mixed with a lot.

Of other rough big.

Somewhere between forty and seventy pounds.

Okay, you know.

I don't know if you're in a color you recently got a dog. It's forty to seventy pounds.

I should have adopted the dog, like in Australia or something where they would.

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

What do you feeding those things?

Now?

They're six months old?

So 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, until they eventually startied in ground meats mostly beef and horse meat. Raw meat, yeah, rob me. 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 they've transitioned from that sort of ground meat

Are they in like a big outdoor enclosure?

Yeah?

So I heard a rumor where it is. Oh you did, Yeah, that should be good.

Wait are you letting out private? Yeah?

Okay, I'll tell private because it might be accurate.

I just heard and I was like.

Really, oh that would be good.

I want to hear that off.

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

I will tell you they are in the northern continental United States. They live on about two thousand acres of a wildlife preserve.

Oh yeah that fits.

Yeah, we might be 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 dire Wolf that we made a wooly mouse. Yeah, I 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 wooly mammoths and that we're targets for us to

One.

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 a direwolf. We knew we were about to launch a direwolf. We said, there's no way we could tell anybody even what state these animals are in, because suddenly people will be showing up and two thousand acres is a lot to protect.

So if they're on two thousand acres, they there's no way you have a two thousand acre parcel that's free of other animals.

No, yeah, it's so.

Are they hunting whatever's on this two thousand acres.

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

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

I've seen them chase deer off things like that, so they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it. But yeah, 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.

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

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 pre fencing, but coyotes are pretty widely they can get through some of that.

So you got two thousand acres with no coyote on it. There's gonna be some people to want to talk.

Yeah, yeah, but you know they undergo a pretty typical vaccination, right, and similar to what we would do with other animals.

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 them?

Oh? If three? Okay?

So if three and there is an intention that will bring new litter on. Because our goal was to get to six to eight sort of a typical pack size. Obviously, you know we ended up at three, so we'll look at adding another litter to that to that group.

Hit me with it.

We're gonna get in 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? Why?

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 Willie mammoth, Tasmani, and tiger ditto, those are going to take us a while.

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

Of you guys in twenty sixteen, way before Colossal was the thing.

This was long. Yeah, so they were operating on like an assumption that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet.

And that was when the Wooly Mammittee things and 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 advantage. Yeah, so it was really it was great forethought. We use that as as a bit of a guiding light in the way that we designed this project. Because so we know a lot

So you do it knowing they won't go into the wild. Because those are our questions that have is how much do you like? How much how worried or 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 what imperiled species in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species,

I mean, that's a question we get almost every day when 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

Right, That's that's like in my mind, that is the Yeah, Like that is the conversation. And and and I credit like to get somewhere, like, you know, let's let's say look at the people that are eager about the idea of colonizing Mars. Right, Yeah, there's all kinds of questions, huge questions about the possibility 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

What happens, what happens, may we fall off the end of the earth.

At some point it was all or not, but we got to start asking questions answer questions. I feel that with anything to do with the extinction, Like, because I don't understand the science, I'm not like train enough, smart enough to.

Understand the science.

You are a doctor, though I am.

Other area of 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 thiosine or an approximate we have an approximate ivory built woodpecker. We humbly ask your

Because there's got to be a like, what's going to happen? And if we do, yes, we want to see what's going to happen?

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 right? If we could restore a diallyscene to Tasmania, could we start to reduce wildlife disease 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

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

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 tis that are like imperiled and you could grow those.

If they won't let them caught them loose.

I'm just saying I think it's also not an either or proposition, that's not how we work. We are a mores 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 spaces front by using the extinction as an engine

Yeah. On what was the island they put them on?

Oh? Yeah, I can't even was it off South Carolina? Yeah, it was off South Carolina. Now 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 genetics in the seventies 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 fourteen

Effort, which was controversial at the time.

And now people hail it as one of the biggest successes.

What it was like, well, you're corrupting the Florida gene pool or it's not the same thing. Yeah, those Florida panthers will now be not quite Florida panthers.

But they won't be cross eyed and can Yeah, And.

People are like, well they're closer than none.

Yes, would be the art. 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 performed 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 the species provide to its ecosystem versus genetic purity in this weird eugenics mentality we have

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.

But in that case, the hand of man, I mean they were in a pen. Off of that, they were in an enclosure on an island, right to build up a reproducible numb I understand. I'm just saying it's very different.

Yeah, Well, and the hand of man is why they're going extinct, right we were, Yeah, we were poaching them out of existence.

But let me hit you with a critical let me red wolf criticism.

Yeah, 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, recovering it and using it for something else exactly. So it's like it's pure what the work is added. Well, there's the criticisms 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. Yes,

It is not a silver bullet to the red wolf problem. It provides a genetic rescue and get 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 Fishing Wildlife announced, Hey, we're gonna start finding a

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 Kyle's roll in.

People talk about admixture. You know, people will say call it hybridization, and hybridization is the wrong word, but admixture sort of this idea that two species have this you know, blending of genetics. They look at that as a bad thing, as it as diluting the gene stock of a species. But you know, hybridization and admixture of species is a natural process. It's actually evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advantages to animals, gives them the opportunity to thrive with a

That's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system of know that we.

What's wolf, canis lupus.

Yeah, canis lupis.

We're Homo sapien. The rainbow trout is on crinth, on corinth, this micas micas whatever the hell you go in and you say, ki, I'm gonna 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.

Yes, things right, It's similar to things come together and fall apart, and it's not static. It's a snapshot.

When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem. We say recovered to what right are we recovering? You know, in North American centric conservation we say recover to fourteen ninety two, right, recovered before Europeans came in and ruined the place.

Yeah, that's always my view.

Yeah, 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 it's it's 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.

When I had many conversations with friends of mine in the wildlife world, when when Colossal made its announcement about the dire wolves, one of the conversations I can't remember who the hell is talking to was saying to me, you know where this would be really helpful. Blackfooted ferrets. Absolutely, blackfooted ferriests went through a ten ferret bottleneck.

Mm hmm.

Okay, but I want to return. I want to do the regulatory thing about ivory built woodpeckers and blackfooted ferrets who like who? What would ever have to say? Okay to be that like our population? Our global population of blackfooted ferrets was reduced down to ten animals, But we have all these specimens that show a level of genetic diversity that did not exist in those ten Those blackfooted farans aren't getting shot they're not getting run over, right,

So blackfoot affair, it's a great example because they've been using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue blackfooted ferret because people were banking tissues of blackfoot affairs back into the seventies. So if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone that they brought back. She was, you know, an unrepresented founder.

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

Yeah, now someone's 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.

Okay, 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 going to put it back into this place. And so I mean someone's capable of saying like it's close enough.

And that's US Fish and wildlife typically. But once we start getting into gene editing and sure start inviting more regulators to 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 their realities and people are scrambling to say, how the hell do we do this?

So could you run? Could you How long does a blackfooted fair it live?

Ten twelve years?

Okay?

Could you run?

Would it makes sense that you would run a generation? Right, you'd make a plag resistant blackfooted ferret if you ran it for a 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? Yeah, I think does it take like would you have to run five generations? It's a good question that puts you sixty years down the road.

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 doing how how much do we need to do Because we've studied domestic ferrets for mm hmm hundreds of years, right, that might

Like you feel that that the constant exposure could in time, that the susceptibility could could.

Return potentially, I see.

Yeah.

A month ago, Time magazine reported that the Mandan and Ricara 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.

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.

So in two thousand acre enclosure, Yeah, okay.

So a year and a half ago we launched Colossal's Indigenous Council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community from the indigenous world to the table to say, how

UH.

It was 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 dire wolves back to our lands so we can also honor this UH this ancestral wolf that's important to our people.

Who has done this is a global story? Who's done a good or a bad job? From your perspective of covering it?

That's a that's a great question.

I don't know. Yeah, there was one that was crazy.

What's that one?

It was like, I don't even want to say on the air.

It was like a cult reporter.

Oh yeah, we won't give them any clicks. That was wild. That was that was just looney tune stuff. I think there's been some bad stuff. A good example is what is the Cowboy Statesman. There's a Wyoming publication. 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, steps to the end. Yeah, yeah, And it was just you know, this is going to be horrible for Yellowstone. You know.

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

Yeah, I was skipping a lot of steps.

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 posted after Secretary Bergham had come out with the public statement of support for the extinction technologies as a tool for conservation. Was basically there. The headline was this really superficial stretch that said, oh, Secretary Bergham and the Trump administration will use the extinction to gut the Endanger Species Act. And they've said that. Well,

I read that, and that was but that's a very common kind of environmental reporting. Yeah, that it was. He he said something to the effect of in a perfect world, we would never get there.

Yes, And then that was taken like, in.

A proper role, we would never get to needing the ESA correct, which would wind up being if you if you pull a bunch of Americakinson said, would you like to live in a world where the Endangered Species Act was never necessary? Everyone will go Well, sure, he says that, and it's that he must mean he's going to get rid of it.

Yeah, it's just funny and it happens.

It was like it was it was a wild extrapolation, but I see what they were getting at. They're getting at that. It would be like, oh, they're going to use a squishy definition, right that, Like like, here's the fear. I'm guessing, like what what's driving the mentality? It would be that you get down to ten blackfooted ferrets and someone saying like, wow.

They really should have ees a protection.

And they'd be like, don't worry, we just ordered two hundred, right, But what's missing and like that's like I think that's what they're getting That would become the play in that sort of that just you know, menu of options and ordering the next species of interest. What's missing in that whole thing is habitat. And that's what I think a lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very

Well, that's the thing.

I mean.

If the ESA comes with what many people would call like onerous regulations right regarding protecting habitat, other people would be like, oh.

No, it's like we need them anymore.

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

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

I want. I want a narrow one on the ivy build woodpecker. Maybe you can correct me on some of this, but here's why it excites me. It's like.

There still is habitat.

There is people more today than when they went extinct.

Yeah, Like, I mean, there was a lot of habitat destruction that led to the problem, but there is habitat. Uh, this was so recent, right, there's people alive right now, there are people alive that saw Ivory build woodpeckers.

Yeah, there's actually like photographs of them. There's a real to real video of what they think was the last Ivory build woodpecker leaving as singer was cutting down the tree.

Yeah.

It's pretty powerful.

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

Yeah.

Dan Flores talks about that while New World is They're like, oh, yeah, there's some in that tree. Literally, I mean, I'm not joking literally that 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 with the thing in there as like a hey man, don't tell me what to do kind of thing.

You know, I'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, and just be a bird.

Yep, it'd be like a bird.

It 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.

Ye.

I can't think of anyone except affiliated woodpecker that would maybe be annoyed.

They 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.

No, there's not there.

If we people you go like, how do you feel about bringing the irobialt woodpecker back, most people would be like the what Yeah, like it's the woodpecker is here, not long ago, We're gonna put it back.

It's just it's a woodpecker. They'd probably be like, Okay, you know what I.

Mean, Like like that seems to me, just from from a novice perspective, that seems to me like the thing.

To do first, Well first is hard, right, there's technical challenges and the 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 and overcoming the technical challenges, the biggest challenges. There is an important step in a d 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 direable cell. Now we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer,

It meaning the road being the regulatory structure.

Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally keep species off our duty lists?

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 I Rebuild Woodpecker.

What is is it? Mauritius mauritious?

Yeah?

What is their attitude toward the Dodo?

It's interesting 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 there was not.

Wasn't it people that wiped out the dodo.

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.

Plus sometimes I thought they just ate them all.

There's 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, you know, 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 was this gross, greasy bird.

So crystal ball it for me? What ook at never not the science, the social component. If you had a 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 islet and let's yeah cuss somehow, and they're just gonna They're gonna just live or die. They their ability to make a living here.

I would never say anything's one hundred percent, because we could get wiped out by a night an asteroid. But right there there's I mean, I'm ruled out that. I like that the Earth kind of keeps going along. Yeah, I think it's ninety nine percent. Beth and I went to Murcius 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

So for all the reasons they've been recovering it Yeah.

Yeah, they just wanted to bring background island. It has a lot of endemic species that we're important to try to save. So they're already doing this great work, I think colossal showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance, bring more funding, try to bring technology to the table to do just that. So there are the reason why I think it's so high and imercious. The chances are so high and maercious. It's because there's all these islets

Yeah, like if suddenly tomorrow all the grizzly bears in the lower forty eight when extinct us and you guys were like, oh that's okay, we can repopulate. There's still only so there's not a lot of appropriate habitat available for them, right, So.

In an island.

Situation, you have way more control. But it seems like your challenge is not like growing the animal, it's like cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully.

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.

Yeah.

I think this is a huge step for a society to say we want to take this next step. Whoever is will be the first government regulator culture to say we want to introduce a species return 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.

Yeah.

If we did this in the US, Canada would say what the hell are you doing?

Yeah, we know it's a little bit interesting. A similar approach was we wound up introducing wild turkeys in a lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. Yeah, so you know they think that historically he had turkeys and what's today thirty four states. Now we have turkeys in

But that was like one little.

Test and 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 climates changed so much you might not get away with that what they were doing with

Oh like the cultural climate change.

Yeah, you know what 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 fifties, they brought add ad into Texas, they brought Ibex into New Mexico.

They bought oricx in New Mexico, and there.

Was kind of a let's just see what happened, 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 fourteen percent of twenty percent of historic range. Fourteen percent of historic range, there's kind of mind boggling. Yeah, and that recovery effort is ground to a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just there's a less of an appetite to move servids from one area to

Well, yeah, I think you know there is a certain aspect of this that is you know better than 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 take that precautionary approach because now we know better, so we must do better. However, I think the pendulum swunk all the way where now it's you know, any change

No, and look, I was management help, Yeah, exactly.

So I think we need to sort of the pendulum needs to come back to the center. I think, you know, on most things in life, from 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, and 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.

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

Well, we had a lot of great folks, I mean, you know, obviously we were blown away that we got the cover 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. Oh yeah, so, although we're mad at them, if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's pretty good story.

They know they were breaking it.

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 many, you know, there's one hundred and seventy five people at Colossal that we're working their tails off to

He gave you a bad quote.

Yeah, well, you know, I was. I was out of 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? You know, chief Animal Officers not a title. People really know what the hell it means. I'm not sure I know what it means. It's like you're a zoo keeper or something, chief zookeeper. One of my guys on my team calls

Of course.

That's the one thing he published.

Like a cocky.

I was like, there's a lot of thought that goes into what I do, right, But but it was fine. But yeah, I think there was a vast majority. I's a ninety five percent 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 ass like almost just for the purpose of clickbait.

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

That's what I like about it. I think the conservation pot needs to be stirred. Like I said, I think we've gone to this fear based approach, where you know, in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at 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.

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 specie that is like.

We 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 forty five conservation partners. That's forty five separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation. Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock

We're right vay getting They like, what in the end, because you're not a nonprofit, you're not an.

Environmental we have a non profit, you have oh not a foundation?

Yep, Well, then there's a for profit component one in the end, what is the product?

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

Now clients being universities and research facilities. Exactly, I gotcha.

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, you know, a new tool in the way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle limit to you know, smaller pieces of plastic microplastic. This is

I've seen how wrapped or 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 end to feed the chicks. To prevent human imprinting, And what kind of protocols that you guys have about dealing with your three dire wolves, Like how many humans have they seen?

Oh, they've probably seen say fifteen or twenty, 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 dire wolves, but with the red wolves that we cloned, you know,

There's a certain degree of like learn behavior too, right, Like wolves need to be taught how to hunt by their pack, 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 pack it 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 nerd because someone we're going to get at.

But as far as like you never.

You would never be able to get to a situation where you would have real dial like diar Rols teaching diar Rolls how.

To be direbls. You know that's impossible.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible generations to get to, but you first have to.

Know what there's no way to find out.

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 dire wolf, What the hell? This thing's an enormous hyper carnivore and really what they were going, well, that's not a direolf. You're so sure that's not a diarolf? Can you please tell me what

But and the thing and the behavior thing though this isn't the hack on it.

But I'm saying, like you just.

You might get you might get where you can win the debate and say, like, based on an agreed upon definition.

This is a dire wolf.

But what the problem is when you if you say like, behaviorally, there's no foundation for it.

We can't say definitively no, you would never know what the animal what was doing. We haven't studied it. I mean, there's how many species across the world that are live today that we don't know behaviorally what they do, what is their function with an ecosystem?

You know.

So it's it's a valid point. It's one that it will challenge the extinction as we go forward. But I don't think it's a reason to not pursue the.

Exc 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.

They love sticks, O big fans of sticks.

Like wolf puppies love sticks.

I don't know, yeah, I mean I don't think they get a lot of sticks to say, and tire.

You guys carrying bones around it?

Do you guys like go in there and cuddle with them, or will they rip your arm off.

There's no cuddling at this point. You know, 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 it's 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

So what about their behavior is surprised you though?

I know it is 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 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

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

Yeah, so we're looking you know, fossil record kind of suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that one hundred and thirty hundred forty pounds up to one hundred and sixty pounds. I think we're on pace for one hundred and forty pounds. Where we stand today, we're seven and a half months as shy of one hundred pounds. As is, their growth

M I'm excited for this Ivory build woodpecker situation.

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

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

We get that on the thighlasting project too.

Oh don't need Yeah, there's one behind my own.

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

Yea, yeah, do you guys use that term Lazarus? We haven't.

Yeah, but it's good. It's a good analogy.

I was going to get to this before we're running out of time, but uh, Crystal ballt on Crystal Ball at on Tasmania saying hell, yeah, let's cut some thiosines loose.

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

They don't have any non natives.

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

I can see that.

So I think there will be an onerous owner's process in order to get there. But I would say, yeah, you know, you know, that's sort of seventy five eighty five percent chance that they will definitely come along. I think Mauritius is much more willing to take that.

What was the percent chance on Tasmania seventy five eighty five? Really optimistic.

I'm telling you, what's these animals are back? I think, well, he'll be fighting people to say why is it in Texas in the United States and not in Tasmania.

I love Willem Dafoe. One of the worst movies ever made. His style of scene movie, it's really bad. Just the logic. They had magical backpack syndrome.

What is that?

Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack.

Inducing like all sorts of ships.

It's like a Harry Potter bag and I just keep pulling stuff out of it.

And it's 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 times, and then that's just what came out in the end. Terrible.

I assume on the show.

I'd love to have.

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.

I think it's I'm aware we're the only the extinction species preservations.

Nobody else, the only people.

We truly compete with the other nation states. You know, Korea has pursued some of the stuff. We know China has an interest in it, but it's not really at a company level. I think you're acutey. I think you're about to see people come in, but they're about four hundred and fifty million dollars in five years late.

Are you guys constantly suns discouraged?

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

You know what we get. We get a lot of that where it's you know, hey, THI listen, is a really cool project. But did you consider about like the red pilliated northwest woodpecker. Right, it's like some random bird that you got well I didn't actually let me look it up, and you go, well, it's not really just extirpaated from that area. It's still lounge. Yeah, right there, you get a lot of that type of stuff.

Dude, Thanks for coming on.

Man, Hey, always great to be here. You guys, come on time you want I appreciate that, because I'll take you up on that, because you know, we're working in Yellowstone on a pretty regular basis now, so we're up in your neck of the woods.

People aren't gonna like to hear that.

I don't think.

Well, if you're not dire related.

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 to 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 remissing, like whatever happened. This made everybody smarter because everybody said, wow,

I love that. I'm going to steal that from you as well, because.

I'm trying to get things that made everybody dumber.

This isn't that positive.

I think, Yeah, everybody got dumber.

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 where 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, you didn't.

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.

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

I like that, right, I like that.

Yeah, it's a potster, dude, but it made everybody smarter exactly. No, I like I like it. It's like it's like a real mental It causes a lot of mental wrestling. Yeah, you know, what was that quote we had recently? That's the last thing I say. But it's not really applicable here, but I think we're Dan Floyda. No, it's a great quote. Dann Floyes 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 steak here. But I think the main thing is it's like, not the main thing. It's just fun to watch.

Yeah, I appreciate that. It's fun to watch.

People like all of a sudden arguing about stuff that the day before they didn't know.

Yeah, it's perfect.

You guys should do an Irish el connect.

I won't tell you we're not going.

Hunters would love that. Diarls could eat him.

It works for me.

He's got the amusement part figured out, all right. Thanks man, I really appreciate you coming.

Thank you so much.

Thank you