On the morning of April 8, I was on a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica. Removing my sunglasses, I stared at a magnificent beast I thought was impossible to lay eyes on. Richard Attenborough was behind me in a white fedora whispering, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

At least that’s how I felt when I learned of the report that Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based company, had brought the dire wolf back from extinction through genetic engineering.

The dire wolf, or Aenocyon dirus, roamed throughout North America thousands of years ago. It is anatomically distinguished from the modern gray wolf by its larger size, including a larger skull but smaller brain, and lighter limbs. Smilodon (“saber-toothed tigers”), Columbian mammoths and ground sloths shared the dire wolf’s environment.

As of 2024, according to Colossal, dire wolves are no longer relegated to the fossil record.

A Prehistoric Park

Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church and billionaire Ben Lamm founded Colossal in 2021. Its mission is to bring back extinct animals through genetic programs.

Colossal obtained genetic information from two dire wolf fossils from Ohio and Idaho. They used the genetic information to re-create a dire wolf genome. The idea of bringing an extinct animal back to life often brings images of injecting preserved dna into an ovum. Colossal took a slightly less invasive approach. Dire wolves are almost 99 percent genetically identical to gray wolves. Colossal compared the genomes of a dire wolf and gray wolf; then, using crispr, a gene-editing technology that has been available for decades, they edited the genes of gray wolf cells to match 20 “key genes” of a dire wolf. The modified genetic material was then injected into an empty dog ovum and later implanted in a surrogate dog mother.

Three dire wolves have been made this way: Romulus and Remus in 2024 and Khaleesi in 2025. They are being kept in an undisclosed 2,000-acre facility in the northern United States. Colossal only released the news on April 7.

A gray wolf has approximately 19,000 genes. Editing 20 wolf genes to create another wolf may be overhyping the development. Colossal’s animals may look like little more than souped-up gray wolves. Palaeontologist Neil Shubin commented: “These are not dire wolves: These are gray wolves with 20 edited genes. The way they are selling this is not only misleading, it doesn’t do justice to the science that they’ve done and the applications they will pursue.”

But those 20 genes made enough difference to give the wolves larger proportions, unique vocalizations and thick, pale coats not found on normal wolves.

“There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9 percent gray wolf,” Love Dalén, professor at Stockholm University’s Center for Palaeogenetics and an adviser to Colossal, told cnn. “There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question.” Dalén continued: “It carries dire wolf genes, and these genes make it look more like a dire wolf than anything we’ve seen ….”

Colossal already has similar projects to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the thylacine. But technically, “de-extinction” has already happened. In 2003, Spanish scientists cloned the recently extinct Pyrenean ibex. However, the baby lived outside the womb only for a few moments—making the Pyrenean ibex the only animal so far to go extinct twice.

Cloning is a sensitive technology with many ethical questions surrounding it. But is the goal of bringing back lost wildlife unattainable?

Lost World

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (iucn) estimated in 2020 that 711 vertebrates (animals with a backbone) have gone extinct since the year 1500. Long gone are the days when somebody could lay eyes on a live great auk, a Steller’s sea cow, a giant moa or plenty of other species. The iucn estimates over 47,000 species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction. This includes 37 percent of cartilaginous fish (sharks and relatives), 41 percent of amphibians and 44 percent of reef corals.

Colossal hopes its technology can help fix this. Lamm started Colossal to reverse modern extinction trends and the following changes for human civilization.

The Trumpet, through the lens of Bible prophecy, focuses its coverage on a coming man-made disaster cataclysmic for human civilization. (See here for more information.) While the human cost of this disaster is by far the most important, notice some prophecies about how man’s decisions will affect the environment:

• “How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate” (Joel 1:18).
• “[A] great people and a strong …. A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them” (Joel 2:2-3).
• “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved …” (Matthew 24:22).
• “[A]nd the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up” (Revelation 8:7).
• “Then the second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it became blood as of a dead man; and every living creature in the sea died” (Revelation 16:3; New King James Version).

Some of these crises happen because man has made large sections of our world uninhabitable for practically any life. Others are curses from God because of man’s rebellion. But contrast this with what God said during “creation week”:

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. … And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
—Genesis 1:20-22, 24-25

God restored the planet’s surface in six days (a timetable that puts dire wolf’s time on Earth much closer than Colossal’s estimates). The iucn estimates that over 2.1 million different species of animals, plants and fungi exist on Earth today. Job 38-41 show God took time to design each creature individually. At least for the generic types of animals, this all happened in a matter of days. And God branded His creation good. God enjoyed creating such a diversity of life, and He wanted His creation to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth abundantly. God took the time to personally bless these creatures.

Following this account is the creation of Adam—whom God placed in a garden populated with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Genesis 2:9). God soon then taught Adam about “every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air” (verse 19). God intended mankind to have a close relationship with nature.

“God intended man to work this Earth, improve it, give it glorious character,” the late Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages, “and in so doing to build into his own life the ‘beauty of holiness’ (1 Chronicles 16:29). … But what has man done on the Earth where God placed him? Man has made ugly, polluted, defiled, profaned everything his hands have touched. He has polluted the air, befouled the water in the rivers, lakes and seas. He has deteriorated the land, denuded the forests, thus altering rainfall and causing the expansion of deserts.”

You could add “man has caused God’s creation to go extinct.” How many God-designed creatures has mankind killed off? Yet the Bible shows the worst “mass extinction event” in the age of man is yet to come.

Finding a Way

At the climax of this coming cataclysm, God Himself will intervene to stop the chaos, end man’s self-destructive spiral, and bring utopia under the Kingdom of God. Notice God’s descriptions of the lands man would have rendered apocalyptic:

• “The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, Even with joy and singing. … The parched ground shall become a pool, And the thirsty land springs of water; In the habitation of jackals, where each lay, There shall be grass with reeds and rushes” (Isaiah 35:1-2, 7; nkjv).
• “This water flows toward the eastern region, goes down into the valley, and enters the sea [the Dead Sea]. When it reaches the sea, its waters are healed. And it shall be that every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live. There will be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters go there; for they will be healed, and everything will live wherever the river goes. It shall be that fishermen will stand by it from En Gedi to En Eglaim; they will be places for spreading their nets. Their fish will be of the same kinds as the fish of the Great Sea [the Mediterranean Sea], exceedingly many” (Ezekiel 47:8-10; nkjv).
• “… I will even make a road in the wilderness And rivers in the desert. The beast of the field will honor Me, The jackals and the ostriches, Because I give waters in the wilderness And rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19-20; nkjv).

“Can you imagine such a fabulous scene?” Mr. Armstrong asked in The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like. “Deserts becoming green, fertile, garden lands of trees, shrubs, bubbling springs and brooks; mountains brought low, and made inhabitable. … Think about the vast wastes of this Earth. Does it sound incredible, unbelievable that God could make them blossom like a rose? Why should it?”

Some see the destruction caused by extinction and are trying to fix it. Their solution is genetic magic, creating test-tube creatures from the genes of other species. Even then, they can only create a few animals at a time. And the types of animals they can work with are limited.

But God is not limited. For “exceedingly many” fish to swim in the seas that were recently plagued with everything in them dying suggests a supernatural renewing of world life. God did it once before (Psalm 104:30); He can do it again.

Maybe this will involve bringing back creatures that went extinct thousands of years ago, creatures like the dire wolf.