Years back, a Chinese zoo earned well-deserved mockery by painting two dogs so that they could be passed off, unsuccessfully, as giant pandas. Now, imagine taking the basic premise of that scam, making it much more expensive and complicated, and then bragging to the world about it.
Just in time to have missed April Fool's Day, the American biotech company Colossal claimed that they have brought the dire wolf back from extinction through cloning. It's a story that the media has been fascinated with and which has garnered a lot of attention and speculation.
Counterpoint: No, they really haven't.
The animals that they produced are nothing but (slightly) genetically-modified wolves. There isn't a trace of actual dire wolf DNA in them. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a dire wolf is in pop culture, which is probably not helping the situation. A dire wolf is not a made-for-fiction animal, that is essentially a big gray wolf as seen in Game of Thrones (actual, the species is often shown as being larger in fiction than it was in real life). It wasn't even in the same genus as modern wolves under recent classification - it was an entirely separate canid. The fact that they made a point of making them white - which there is no evidence that they were, but seems to have been an aesthetic choice to match the wolf "Ghost" from A Game of Thrones - makes it even harder for me to take this company seriously.
Even if this was a real "de-extinction," I'd consider this a foolish endeavor. If we actually had this technology, it would best be used with species that recently went extinct due to human causes, and which could have a chance to be re-wilded. Dire wolves went extinct thousands of years ago. Their niche is gone, taken over by other species. Even if something genetically identical to one were brought back (which this in no way even approaches), we'd have no place for it to go, as well as no idea if it would even be behaviorally competent or ecologically viable. Instead of conservation work, these people have essentially created a designer carnivore, of as much ecological use as a white tiger.
What's worse, some tech and political figures (including US Vice President J.D. Vance's patron, Peter Thiel) are hailing this as the future of conservation. Who cares if species go extinct? We can clone them back later! Or at least something that vaguely looks like what we think they should be.
Colossal has been one of the companies vocally claiming that they are going to bring back the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger). With this being the example of the work they've produced so far, I'm not holding my breath for what come out of the lab.
Experts dispute claim dire wolf brought back from extinction
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