Ben Lamm, the billionaire founder of Colossal Labs, and Sophie Turner spoke about his company’s efforts in reviving the long-extinct dire wolf during a panel at SXSW’s first London outpost.
The wolf re-entered the public consciousness because of the television show “Game of Thrones,” in which Turner was a leading character. It turns out that even she thought dire wolves were mythical creatures.
“Were you a fan of ‘Game of Thrones?’” Turner asked.
“I was a fan of ‘Game of Thrones,’” Lamm said. “When ‘Game of Thrones’ came out, which was a while ago, I never thought, ‘Oh, by the way, one day we’ll make dragons or dire wolves.”
Lamm retold the story of how he and his team at Colossal “brought back” the dire wolf species, which had been extinct for more than 10,000 years. He also provided some updates as to what the company is working on next, including a bio-acoustic project, announced just a few weeks ago.
Lamm said his dire wolves started howling at 3 weeks old, responding to human singing and the sounds of owls. The first two, Romulus and Remus, are now around 6 months old. Lamm and his team are looking at ways to use AI to help monitor the behavior of the wolves, identifying patterns of their emotions and “wolf linguistics,” as he put it.
“What’s crazy about it is the dire wolves have their own unique pitch and inflection,” Lamm told the crowd. “We’re going to release that later this year,” he said, referring to a bio-acoustic project, which will map out the different types of dire wolf howls.
The wolves live on a 2,000-acre preservation in a top-secret location. He referred to the park as “very Yellowstone.” It has an animal hospital, as well as full-time caretakers and full-time security. The wolves are learning socialization tactics that would help them in the wild. “They’re starting to do some light predation on the preserve,” he said. “They’re becoming more and more true wolf-like every day.”
He also said that they are about to officially introduce the two wolves to a newly created dire wolf, a female named Khaleesi, who is around 3 months old. The public met Colossal Labs’ efforts to “de-extinct” animals with fascination and skepticism, much of it focused on whether the dire wolves are merely genetically edited gray wolves.
But investors seem quite interested in where Colossal could be headed with its innovation. TechCrunch reported back in March that the company is looking to “revive” the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo, two other extinct animals. The company announced this year a $200 million Series C at a $10.2 billion valuation and said in March it genetically modified mice to grow mammoth-like fur. (Lamm said it impressively took only a month to do.)
Turner did ask Lamm a question that he unsurprisingly gets quite often. “What about dinosaurs?” she asked. “Can you bring them back?”
His company isn’t focused on that at the moment, as bringing a dinosaur back is quite complicated, Lamm explained. But later in the conversation, he said there might be a new update coming from Colossal soon.
“I think maybe this summer, there could be a dodo update that’s interesting,” he said.
Update: This story was updated to provide clarity about the skepticism around Colossal’s dire wolf program. Colossal Labs says a link included in this report is inaccurate. “We are in an issue with them because they misquoted Beth Shapiro,” spokesperson Emily Mailaender wrote in an email. “She never said they weren’t dire wolves. We have been working to get it corrected.” TechCrunch will remove the link if the media outlet retracts its story.