Time magazine wants you to believe scientists have brought dire wolves back from the dead.
Popularized by the HBO series Game of Thrones, dire wolves are the larger, whiter cousins of the modern-day gray wolves. They once roamed North and South America from approximately 150,000 to 10,000 years ago.
According to Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Bioscience, the company that created dire wolves, the animals were the product of interbreeding between two different wolf lineages from about 3 million years ago. It was previously thought that dire wolves and gray wolves split some 6 million years ago.
However, before Shapiro came to Colossal, she co-authored a paper that attempted to reconstruct the evolutionary history of wolves by sequencing genomes from five fossils, including an
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