A year has passed since the long-extinct dire wolf was brought back by “the world’s only de-extinction company,” Colossal Biosciences. This means that the world-famous dire wolf pups that stole hearts and made headlines across the globe this spring have just celebrated their very first birthday!
To mark the occasion, the company has released a special music video with unseen footage from the pups’ first year of life.
“Happy Birthday, Dire Wolf”
Entitled “Happy Birthday, Dire Wolf by Stan Bush, the video details the fascinating journey the dire wolves were set on, from DNA sequencing to life, all set to a new original song.
“We teamed up with Emmy Award-winning legends Stan Bush and Lenny Macaluso, the creators of iconic anthems like “The Touch” from Transformers: The Movie (1986) and “Never Surrender” from Kickboxer (1989). Together, they crafted a brand-new power rock anthem: “’Happy Birthday, Dire Wolf.’”
A 10,000+ year journey from extinction to life
On Oct. 1, 2024, Romulus and Remus were born as a result of a complex process of ancient DNA extraction, DNA sequencing, and multiplex gene editing. According to Colossal, a team of scientists initially extracted DNA from two dire wolf fossils: a ~13,000-year-old tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, which was estimated to be 72,000 years old.
The latter step was conducted on a genome from their closest living relative, the grey wolf.
Finally, the resulting “high-quality cell lines” were transferred into donor egg cells, birthing what the company calls the first dire wolves in over 10,000 years.
The company officially announced the birth of three litters on April 7, 2025, which included two adolescent males, Romulus and Remus, and one female puppy named Khaleesi — though the music video seems to only reference the two male dire wolves.
“This October 1st, Romulus and Remus celebrated their first birthday, a year of growth, play, exploration, and survival,” they explain. “Their journey is a banner of hope for science, conservation, and humanity.”
The world-famous pups even got their own birthday cake, which they’re seen chowing down on at the end of the video. The multi-layered cake was apparently created by a San Francisco luxury dog cake company called Mishka. Very fitting, if you ask us!
The aspirational video is fuelled by ’80s nostalgia and loaded with iconic lines like “ancient blood flows through your veins” and “and 10,000 years, now you are here again.”
Comments wishing the dire wolves a happy birthday are already flooding in, along with a handful asking Colossal whether or not they have plans to bring back any other long-lost species.
Believe it or not, it’s not the first time the company has sought to bring back animal species of the past. According to the American Humane Society, the company worked alongside the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation in November 2024 to reintroduce the dodo bird to its once native habitat off the coast of Madagascar.
To achieve this, the society says that bioengineers combined the bird’s reconstructed genome with its closest living relative, the Nicobar Pigeon, to create an animal that is “indiscernible from what we know of the dodo’s appearance.”
So it’s not their first bioengineering rodeo, and something tells us it won’t be their last.
