this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said "these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit".
I still think this tech has the potential to be helpful in a conservation context.... but it says a A LOT that these "dire wolves" look far more like something you'd see in Game of Thrones than any of the most likely reconstructions proposed by scientists who've studied the fossil record.
These pups might get more robust as they age, but right now I'm not seeing anything to get excited about. I just can't help but suspect that this species was chosen specifically bc the public already has the idea of "dire wolf = gray wolf + big", and that this company is using relatively minor CRISPR editing to give the false impression that they're recreating anything that might have conceivably lived 10,000 years ago.
Again, I think this tech is interesting and merits further development (and if jurassic park is the only way they can do that, then, I guess that's what's happening), but it's still extremely misleading to parade these animals around like they've actually 100% cloned a dire wolf.
Really reminds me of Jurassic Park. In the books, Crichton made it very clear that they didn't actually clone dinosaurs. They just combined DNA to make an animal that looked like what people EXPECT a dinosaur to look like, because it turned out that actual cloned dinosaurs were really quite dull and spent most of their time hiding.
Gonna bring back these bust commissions if anyone is interested! They're 40 USD (50 if they have complicated clothes or details - if you're unsure just ask!).
I'm open to any characters, not just dragons, though I'd like to stick to animals rather than humans/machines/etc.
Contact: Holly.o.lucero@gmail.com
Hey remember when people on this site were absolutely insane about asexuals saying they’re a Trojan horse to sneak in homophobic straight people into the lgbt community or whatever and now JKR is making the same lazy edgelord jokes about asexual people
big day for trans people on ace spectrum (me)
Goes hard I'm afraid
Stupid redcoats I'm fuckin balling
It's called hard sci-fi because it's not as easy
I thought it'd be fun if I made aliens that respirate CO² into O² like plants but I started thinking about how I'm not actually sure how exactly those chemical processes work and now I'm on the wikipedia page for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate
I feel like the media literacy ogre for biochemistry
