Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Biosciences
This resolves YES if the Wooly Mammoth, Tasmanian Tiger, Dodo Bird, or any other extinct species has been de-extincted by the end of 2028 by Colossal Biosciences (or a company or organization that purchases them, contracts with them, or is associated with them meaningfully).
By “de-extincted” this would probably look like the birth of a mammoth calf or dodo chick, for example. If they find another way of bringing back a specimen to life that’s okay too, although I can’t really imagine how that would work.
Should be fairly clear-cut of a resolution but I will still not bet in this market so I can remain unbiased.
Update 2025-04-07 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Additional De-extinction Validation for Genetically Modified Specimens:
For cases involving modified species (e.g., attempts to create a Dire Wolf by inserting genes into Gray Wolf DNA), a YES resolution requires convincing scientific validation that the resulting specimen meets the criteria for being of the target extinct species.
The specimen should be plausibly able to breed with established members of the target species.
It should be genetically closer to the target species than to its original lineage.
Without such validation, modifications that only insert a few genes or alter the appearance are not sufficient to count as de-extinction.
@traders Okay, so there's actually a lot of reasons to believe that the reporting from Time is overly optimistic. I think this represents a Gray area (pardon the pun) and I'm not confident on how to resolve the market on the current news. This market lasts until 2028, so I will obviously not resolve NO yet.
But I'm not sure this should yield a YES resolution as it appears that the modifications to the Gray Wolf to make it a "Dire Wolf" exists closer to "taking a few Dire Wolf genes and inserting them into a Gray Wolf genome" than to "creating a specimen that could have actually bred with genetic Dire Wolves". I'm not going to resolve YES unless I see a convincing scientific validation that the Dire Wolf specimens were meaningfully Dire Wolves in that they could fulfill the scientific definition of belonging to that species, things like:
-being PLAUSIBLY able to breed successfully with Dire Wolves
-at least existing closer to Dire Wolves genetically than to Gray Wolves
-something of that nature, etc, etc
https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
This is going to come down to resolution criteria on what "counts" as a species de-extinction.
This will likely resolve YES if I can verify the accuracy of the Time story here (and other reporting):
https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
Appears quite likely that this meets the threshold of "de-extincting" a species but it's possible it's a ruse or a heavy exaggeration, I guess.
I've seen ppl saying things like "no actual Dire Wolf DNA was used" because Colossal, like, modified the DNA they extracted from biological samples and didn't use the sequences directly? But... this strikes me as an unserious argument and lacks an understanding of how the de-extinction process was always intended.
@bens the question is basically philosophical on how close the genome has to be to count. They made 16 edits to a grey wolf genome, which diverged from dire wolves around 5.7 million years ago, they didn't do any large-scale genome synthesis to replicate the genome sequences we have from dire wolves, and the pups appear to be white, which is definitely not the colour dire wolves were. Grey wolves and dire wolves are not even in the same genus.
We'll get clues to how close they got on the skeletal morphology as time goes on.
@bens my bad, it was 20 edits across 14 genes
https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
"It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining."