Did you know that dire wolves are back? Recently, scientists have “brought back” this extinct species of wolf.
Dire wolves first went extinct around 10,000 years ago because they ate too many horses (like we did with mammoths), and ran out of food. They didn’t eat ALL of them so horses didn’t go extinct, but there were few enough that dire wolves couldn’t continue to be a thing.
Scientists changed a little bit of a gray wolf’s DNA to make it more similar to that of a dire wolf. Technically it’s not a dire wolf, it’s a gray wolf that looks and acts a little weird. They are planning to do the same thing with mammoths by changing the DNA of elephants.
It would be much harder to do this with a species like, say, dinosaurs, because we don’t know what dinosaurs looked like or how they acted exactly since they existed so long ago.
