Beth Shapiro

I was in Mauritius.

I'm Henry Wu, right?

I'm the chief scientist, right?

So I'm a good guy for now.

But he becomes a bad guy in the future, right?

So I'm looking forward to my evil transition.

I'm not.

We're not making dinosaurs.

But, you know, there were other cool animals that we have DNA for.

I heard you talking about the American cheetah.

Yes.

So we have two high-quality genome sequences from American cheetah.

Wow.

We want them back to help with our population problems.

They are dire wolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves.

We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals, one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal that lived 13,000 years ago, and we lined them up next to each other and figured out what it is that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf.

And then we used the tools of genome engineering to bring those traits back in Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, that are three dire wolves that are alive now.

And that has created these animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that dire wolf coat.

And that's a cool thing, too.

That coat, the light coat color that you see, was something that we absolutely could not have known without the ancient DNA because no one has ever seen a dire wolf.