Romulus was born on October 1, 2024.

The company that created him, Colossal, markets itself as a “de-extinction company.”

They want to “bring back” the wooly mammoth, the dodo bird, and even create artificial wombs.

But before you get flashbacks of Jurassic Park…

Romulus, despite the headlines, is NOT a dire wolf.

He’s something A LOT weirder.

And the real story here isn’t even about Romulus.

It’s about AI.

Not in the abstract sense. Not “AI is changing everything” blah blah blah. Because AI isn’t just changing things. It’s making impossible things possible.

And nobody’s ready for it.

The Tooth That Changed Everything

Most dire wolf fossils come from places like the La Brea Tar Pits—great for preserving bones, terrible for preserving DNA.

The heat, the tar, the acidity… it nukes genetic material. That’s why, for decades, scientists believed dire wolf DNA was unrecoverable.

But then a single tooth changed everything.

Colossal got lucky and found a well-preserved tooth deep inside a cave.

Caves, it turns out, are nature’s version of a ziplock bag. They’re cool (stable temperature), dry (low humidity), and dark (no UV light).

Three things DNA loves.

Inside that tooth, they found fragments of ancient DNA.

BUT…

Contrary to the Hollywood version, you don’t just find a perfectly preserved chunk of DNA, toss it in a lab blender, and boom—prehistoric apex predator.

What they had was coverage. Roughly 13x to 14x genome coverage. If the genome is a book, 1x coverage is reading the book once in the dark.

So for ancient DNA, 13x is a miracle.

13x means they could read the same sentences over and over. Cross-check for errors. Align degraded sequences to a modern reference (like the gray wolf) and fill in the blanks with a high level of confidence.

So they took what they had and compared it to the genome of a modern gray wolf. Then they pinpointed the genes that made a dire wolf different.

Skull shape? Edit it. Muscle density? Edit that too. Coat? Behavior? Metabolism? Find the gene. Make the change.

And they made those edits inside a gray wolf embryo.

What was born isn’t a dire wolf.

It’s not a gray wolf, either.

It’s something in between—a genetically engineered hybrid.

Why This Was Impossible… Until Now

Ten years ago, this was science fiction. Editing one or two genes was hard enough. Editing dozens? Like trying to do brain surgery with oven mitts.

CRISPR changed the game.

But even CRISPR, on its own, is a blunt instrument. One wrong snip, and the whole cell can collapse. But now, thanks to AI, scientists can edit DNA with surgical precision.

Instead of blindly guessing, AI helps them see exactly which edits matter—and how to make them without breaking the genome.

That’s what happened with Romulus.

They didn’t just take ancient dire wolf DNA and inject it into a modern wolf.

That wouldn’t work.

They used AI to line up the dire wolf fragments against the complete genome of a modern gray wolf.

Then they zeroed in on the differences that actually mattered: genes that shaped the skull, thickened the fur, added muscle.

And AI made only those edits.

This wasn’t cloning. It wasn’t evolution.

It’s something else entirely. A living organism designed, not discovered. Assembled, not inherited.

A creature that never existed—until now.

And that’s just what we know about.

The real story? While everyone’s distracted…

AI is quietly exceeding the hype.

This isn’t Jurassic Park. It’s the beginning of something much weirder.

And we’re already inside it.