In the world of Game of Thrones, beasts like direwolves still roam the land. At the start of the series, the children of House Stark adopt a bunch of direwolves into the family, although not all of them make it to the end of the series. The direwolves prove useful at several points; who doesn't want to have a huge, fiercely loyal pet wolf at your side?
In our world, dire wolves died out around 10,000 years ago, but a company called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences has just brought them back. Reconstructing the genome of the dire wolf by looking at ancient DNA and using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, Colassal has birthed three dire wolf pups: brothers Romulus and Remus are around six months old. Their little sister Khaleesi is two months.
Romulus and Remus are named after the mythical founders of Rome. Khaleesi, as everyone reading this surely knows, is named after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones; she was known as Khaleesi among her Dothraki followers. Given how Game of Thrones inspired a surge of public interest in dire wolves when it was on, it's only appropriate that the folks at Colaossal pay it homage.
Scientists have revived the dire wolf, a huge wolf species that's been extinct for 10,000 years pic.twitter.com/RGePjRjz6i
— Winter is Coming (@WiCnet) April 7, 2025
Romulus and Remus, pictured above, already measure more than four feet long and weigh around 80 lbs; by the time they're fully grown, they'll be around six feet and weight 150 lbs, bigger than any wolf on record today. The new dire wolves live in a 2000-acre ecological preserve in an undisclosed location, the better to preserve their privacy.
You may be asking why the scientists at Colossal would want to bring back the dire wolf. According to them, it's part of a wider plan to combat the loss of biodiversity in our world. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, 30% of the planet’s genetic diversity will be lost by 2050. Companies like Colossal could help reverse that. “If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people, we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already,” chief science officer Beth Shapiro told TIME.
But there are winkles. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are kept in a huge enclosure with no apparent plans to reintroduce them to the wild. There couldn't be, because the wild they're adapted for no longer exists. And who's to say they wouldn't act as invasive species if they were let loose today, throwing an ecosystem that isn't ready for them out of balance?
And yet the trio exhibit wild behavior; they began howling at a couple weeks old and stalk anything that moves, including leaves. They're trying to hunt, although Colossal has no plans to provide them with live prey.
Colossal has also cloned a few red wolves, a species of wolves on the edge of extinction today, which makes a little more instinctive sense. But they also plan to bring back other extinct species like the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine.
Will there be a place for these creatures in this new world? We'll find out. For now, you can go to sleep knowing that, somewhere in the world, dire wolves are howling for the first time in millennia.
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