by Mira Sheth, 5

Have you ever heard of Romulus and Remus? In Roman mythology, they were twin brothers raised by a she-wolf because their parents abandoned them. One of them, Romulus, went on to found the city of Rome.

Now fast forward to today.

A bioscience company called Colossal Biosciences has named three baby wolf pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. But these aren’t just ordinary wolves—they’re part of an experiment to bring dire wolves back from extinction. They went extinct over 10,000 years ago. Colossal found DNA from old fossils and compared it with today’s gray wolves. They changed the gray wolf DNA by editing the genome. Then they put the embryo in a female gray wolf and the pups were born. They now want to do this for woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers.

In the past you might have heard of Dolly the sheep, the first animal ever cloned from a cell. She was born in 1996 and lived a fairly normal sheep life, but Dolly aged faster than normal and had health problems.

Bringing back an extinct animal might sound cool, but it raises some big questions:

• Will these new wolves be healthy and safe?
• How will they fit into the wild? Will it disturb food chains?
• Could they harm the environment or other animals if they get released?

Some scientists worry that changing animals this way could cause problems we don’t expect. Others think it could help bring balance back to nature and even save endangered animals.

What do you think?