Colossal’s Dire Wolf Pack Is Finally One

For most of Game of Thrones’ run on HBO, much like the still unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire book series that the TV show is based on, creators got a lot of mileage out the Stark children and the heartstrings they pulled whenever they interacted with some pet direwolves. Despite only being under the same roof for two episodes (or a handful of chapters in George R.R. Martin’s massive novels), the Stark kids spent years yearning to be reunited, an anguished longing symbolized by the loneliness, abandonment, and even death suffered by their direwolves. When a few grown Stark siblings finally got together in the later seasons, in spite of what revisionist social media complaints might say now, the general reception was euphoric.

Luckily the real-life dire wolves engineered by Colossal Biosciences need not wait so long.

Just three months after Colossal broke the internet and announced that they had brought the dire wolf back from extinction—or at least a version of it, given the debate over whether they qualify as the exact same species of wolf that went extinct around the end of the Pleistocene epoch—the company has now given an update on the progress of their three dire wolves: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. While Romulus and Remus were born in 2024, Khaleesi was the younger pup, only howling for the first time near the beginning of this year. Yet today all three have finally interacted.

As carefully (and adorably) captured by Colossal, Khaleesi was introduced for the first time to the older Romulus and then Remus in an undisclosed nature preserve in the northern regions of North America.

“All of [the] processes and thoughts and needs are being addressed, and the team is constantly reassessing and working together to make sure that we’re providing the best welfare for these guys,” said Paige McNickle, the Colossal manager of animal husbandry. Speaking on camera, McNickle explained Khaleesi’s integration into a controlled setting with the other dire wolves.

As seen in the footage, Khaleesi met with each male wolf one at a time and took special care with the bigger Romulus to maintain some distance by using her smaller frame to hide beneath a pair of nearby logs. Due to Romulus and Remus being closer to fully grown, neither is able to reach the younger female wolf from that place of safety when she chooses to hide.

“That helped her control the interaction,” explained McNickle, “so she could come out and sniff his nose and play with him, and then go back in whenever she was like ‘woah.’”

While all three wolves were united briefly on the first day of what appear to be decidedly happy interactions, the current plan is to allow Khaleesi to interact only with one male wolf at a time on alternating days for at least the next several months. As Khaleesi grows bigger, she will eventually be able to run with both Romulus and Remus, with the ideal plan being to eventually integrate all three into a literal wolf pack.

When we previously spoke with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm, the de-extinction proponent discussed the possibility of making several more dire wolves so they could build a full-sized wolf pack of seven to eight dire wolves. He even seemed open to naming one of those potential next generation of wolves Nymeria (the name of the fictional direwolf queen who briefly belonged to Arya Stark in Game of Thrones).

We’d welcome that development. Because as this ultimately wholesome video reminds, there is a saying in the Stark family: “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”