Dear Cherubs, Dallas has apparently decided extinction is just a product category. Colossal Biosciences is now a billionaire-level biotech spectacle, with the company saying its latest Series C brought total funding to $615 million and ABC News reporting a roster of celebrity backers that includes Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Paris Hilton and Peter Jackson. Dallas Innovates also reported that the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, invested in Colossal back in 2022.

The result is a company that sounds like it was brainstormed by a film studio, a venture fund and a very committed science teacher. Colossal says it is working on de-extinction projects tied to the woolly mammoth, dodo, thylacine and dire wolf, using gene editing, synthetic biology and related conservation tools. So no, this is not literally Jurassic Park; it is more like Jurassic Park after legal review and a lot of grant money.

THE TEA, BUT WITH MICROPIPETTES

In April, Reuters reported that Colossal announced three genetically engineered wolf pups and called them the world’s first successfully “de-extincted” animals, while outside experts were more cautious and described them as genetically modified gray wolves with added dire-wolf traits. ABC News said Colossal edited gray wolf cells at multiple sites and noted the two species are about 99.5% genetically identical, which is a very impressive number and also a reminder that biology is rude and complicated.

That is the key detail the movie version never pauses for: the company is not dusting off a frozen dinosaur and pressing play. It is using ancient DNA, gene editing and surrogate biology to create something that resembles an extinct species closely enough to trigger headlines, debates and a healthy amount of side-eye. The label “de-extincted” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

WHY THE MONEY FLOWS

The money makes more sense when you look at the technology stack. Dallas Innovates reported that In-Q-Tel said its interest in Colossal was “less about the mammoths and more about the capability,” while Colossal’s own materials say the work could scale CRISPR, synthetic biology, artificial wombs and genomic preservation platforms. In other words, the extinct-animal angle is the headline; the platform is the business.

Colossal has also built a pop-culture-friendly halo around the science. Its advisory board page lists Tom Brady and George R.R. Martin among its cultural advisors, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes the internet stop scrolling for a second. That is the trick here: make de-extinction feel part science, part blockbuster, part meme, and suddenly the cap table looks almost inevitable.

The hot take is simple: this is not a cartoonish clone factory, and it is not pure hype either. It is a very expensive attempt to push gene editing, cloning-adjacent methods and reproductive tech into territory that could one day matter for conservation as much as spectacle. The dinosaurs are still fiction, but the lab bills are extremely real.

Sources list
ABC News — https://abcnews.go.com/US/dire-wolf-revived-biotech-companys-de-extinction-process/story?id=120558562
Reuters — https://www.reuters.com/science/us-company-resurrects-extinct-dire-wolf-or-some-version-it-2025-04-08/
Dallas Innovates — https://dallasinnovates.com/mammoth-interest-the-cia-invests-in-dallas-based-colossal-biosciences/
Colossal Biosciences — https://colossal.com/colossal-secures-200m-to-accelerate-de-extinction-and-genomic-innovation/
Colossal Biosciences — https://colossal.com/advisors/
Wikimedia Commons (Laboratory.jpg) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laboratory.jpg