Ben Lamm said his company brought back the dire wolf. The debate hasn't stopped since.

AUSTIN — In April 2025, Colossal Biosciences announced something that sounded impossible: three gene-edited wolf pups it described as the first dire wolves to walk the earth in more than 10,000 years. The pups — two males named Romulus and Remus and a female named Khaleesi — were engineered from gray wolf cells, with the company saying it had rewritten 14 genes to express roughly 20 traits associated with the long-extinct predator.

Behind the announcement is Ben Lamm, the entrepreneur who co-founded Colossal with Harvard geneticist George Church to bankroll Church's de-extinction research. Lamm has built the company into one of the most valuable and most scrutinized biotech ventures connected to the region, with a pipeline that also targets the woolly mammoth and the dodo.

The dire wolf reveal drew immediate pushback from scientists who questioned whether genetically modified gray wolves can honestly be called de-extinct animals, or whether the framing oversold what the editing actually accomplished. Colossal has pressed on regardless, leaning into a broader pitch that its tools could advance conservation and even human health.

Why it matters

Colossal sits at the center of a debate Austin's tech scene increasingly has to navigate: the line between a genuine breakthrough and a brilliantly marketed one. Lamm has proven adept at turning a speculative science project into a fundraising and attention machine, raising hundreds of millions of dollars while keeping the company in headlines worldwide.

For the local biotech community, the payoff may be less about resurrecting the woolly mammoth and more about whether the editing and reproductive technologies Colossal is building find practical applications in conservation and medicine. Either way, Lamm has demonstrated that a Texas founder can command the global stage by attempting something most people assumed was off-limits.

Born with 20 dire wolf traits, the modified gray wolves now boast large, muscular frames, sharper teeth and a distinctive howl absent from earth for over 10,000 years.— Colossal Biosciences, as reported by Axios Austin