One company has said that the day has now arrived and that they’ve brought back to life a species that has been gone from the planet for thousands of years—the dire wolf, the larger version of today’s wolves that were made popular in the “Game of Thrones” universe.

When you read the fine print, you see that the company—Colossal Biosciences—didn’t actually bring back a 100 percent authentic dire wolf, but it is arguably pretty close:

In 2021, a separate team of scientists managed to retrieve DNA from the fossils of dire wolves, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago. With the discovery of additional DNA, the Colossal researchers have now edited 20 genes of gray wolves to imbue the animals with key features of dire wolves. They then created embryos from the edited gray-wolf cells, implanted them in surrogate dog mothers and waited for them to give birth.

The result is three healthy wolves — two males that are 6 months old and one female that is 2 months old, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi — that have some traits of dire wolves.

They should grow up to be quite large, but for now, they’re pretty darn cute:

The first dire wolf howl in over 10,000 years pic.twitter.com/Z4PSKdjzYI

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 7, 2025