You’ve probably seen them. Romulus and Remus, the two adorable, fluffy, de-extincted so-called dire wolves. It’s a heartwarming and exciting story that mixes cute animals, technological advances, and conservation. Well, I’m here to burst that bubble. Not only does this not mean that dire wolves have been brought back, but it’s also problematic to think that this is a conservation story.

Here’s why.

Never let the truth ruin a good story

Time magazine put a majestic snow-white wolf on its cover. The caption announced his glorious name — Remus, like one of the mythical brothers who founded ancient Rome. Time’s cover, like many other publications, claims he is a dire wolf, back from extinction after 10,000 years.

That’s not really true.

You’ve probably heard about Colossal Biosciences (the company behind this project) before. The biotech startup focuses on “de-extinction” projects, aiming to revive extinct species through advanced genetic technologies. Their most notable endeavor is their effort to bring back the woolly mammoth by editing the genomes of Asian elephants to express mammoth-like traits. They recently made headlines by creating “woolly mice,” which they claimed is a step towards bringing wooly mammoths back.

The company now says that three genetically modified gray wolf pups are dire wolves. But the two males (called Remus and Romulus, born in October) and one female (called Khaleesi, born in January) are actually gray wolves edited to look like dire wolves.

Wait, what’s a dire wolf?

The dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) was a large, powerful predator that roamed North and South America during the Late Pleistocene. It went extinct some 10,000 years ago. It’s often mistaken for a larger version of the modern gray wolf due to their similar appearances, but dire wolves were a completely different species. In fact, they’re so distinct that they belong to a separate genus. Genetic studies have shown that dire wolves and gray wolves last shared a common ancestor around 5 to 6 million years ago.

Colossal Biosciences says it made 20 gene edits to gray wolf embryos — 15 aimed at mimicking traits from the extinct dire wolf and five that affect coat color. The edited embryos were implanted into domestic dog surrogates, and the resulting pups now live on a 2,000-acre private reserve under 24/7 surveillance.

In essence, what the company did was to edit the genes of today’s wolves to make them look like dire wolves.

In the company’s defense, you could make an argument that they are dire wolves. It all comes down to how you define species. There is something called the morphological species concept, which basically says that two animals that look alike are the same species. For over a century, this was the concept researchers went with because, well, we had nothing else. But then, genetics came in.

The other phylogenetic approach looks at the genes and evolutionary relationships to define what a species is. There’s some debate regarding what a species really is but most biologists favor the phylogenetic approach because it reflects deep evolutionary history and objective genetic differences, rather than just superficial similarities. Colossal goes with the morphological approach, most scientists go with the other.

In the case of dire wolves and gray wolves — which diverged millions of years ago and belong to entirely separate branches of the canine family tree — the phylogenetic concept makes it clear: they are not the same species, no matter how similar they might appear. Dire wolves were not just big, white-furred wolves. In fact, they were not wolves at all in the modern taxonomic sense.

The context this story needs

What Colossal has done, in essence, is to identify a few key genetic shards — stretches of DNA from fossilized remains — and splice versions of them into the genome of a living gray wolf. They’ve created a hybrid, an animal that is essentially a gray wolf but looks like a dire wolf.

The company argues that this was always their goal. They say that they only want to create an animal that can fit in the ecosystem the same way a gray wolf does.

“For anyone working on de-extinction, the goal has never been perfect genomic recreation, but rather restoring the functional traits and ecological role of lost species,” Colossal said in a statement.

But the traits of a dire wolf — its behavior, its ecological niche, its social dynamics — are largely unknown. No one alive has ever seen one hunt. No camera trap has ever recorded a pack behavior. These animals evolved in a world of megafaunal prey that no longer exists. The environment that shaped their species is gone. It’s speculative at best to claim that these animals behave like dire wolves.

Maarten Larmuseau, a genetic genealogist at KU Leuven in Belgium, put it bluntly: “You can’t ‘bring back’ a species just by making another animal look vaguely similar. Behavior, ecology, and learned social traits matter just as much as DNA, and those can’t simply be engineered,” the researcher told NPR.

There’s also an outright dangerous side to this story because of how these sensational claims are already being used. Just look at the United States Secretary of the Interior using such claims to justify taking animals off the endangered species list. If extinction is seen as reversible, why protect species at all?

This is not a conservation story

Look, we’re as excited about gray wolves as everyone else. We love scientific progress, and who hasn’t, at least once or twice, thought about bringing back extinct animals?

But extinction, says paleogeneticist Nic Rawlence, “is still forever.” He explained to the BBC that ancient DNA is too fragmented to fully recreate a lost genome. “It’s like if you put fresh DNA in a 500-degree oven overnight. It comes out fragmented — like shards and dust.” If you create the illusion that you can just destroy species and bring them back, that puts us on a dangerous trajectory.

Colossal’s real achievement is pretty impressive. It’s a step forward in synthetic biology. But it’s not a scientific resurrection. It is marketing. It has taken a minor genetic tweak — twenty edits among nearly 20,000 genes — and spun it into a story grand enough to grace the cover of Time and other publishers.

Remus — along with his siblings Romulus and Khaleesi — is not a dire wolf. Not by any measure of genetic authenticity or by any conservationist principle. What he is, in fact, is a genetically modified gray wolf (and a majestic, adorable one at that).

The dire wolf remains extinct. If we don’t change our ways and start protecting biodiversity, many other species will follow.