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In a piece for CNN’s Call to Earth, Katie Hunt reports that a species of wolf that died out some 12,500 years ago has become the "world’s first successfully de-extincted animal," according to Dallas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal scientists have created three dire wolf pups by using ancient DNA, cloning and gene-editing technology to alter the genes of a gray wolf, the prehistoric dire wolf’s closest living relative. The result is essentially a hybrid species similar in appearance to its extinct forerunner.

"We aren’t trying to bring something back that’s 100% genetically identical to another species. Our goal with de-extinction is always create functional copies of these extinct species. We were focusing on identifying variants that we knew would lead to one of these key traits,"Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer told CNN.

To achieve its goal, the company created a hybrid genome using CRISPR technology to cut away certain gray wolf gene variants and replace them with traits associated with dire wolves, said Love Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genomics based at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University, and an adviser to Colossal.

"There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% gray wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question," Dalén told CNN.

"It carries dire wolf genes, and these genes make it look more like a dire wolf than anything we’ve seen in the last 13,000 years. And that is very cool." He continued, "The way I see this is that they have resurrected the dire wolf phenotype, and we know from the genome that they probably looked a bit like these puppies. To me, it’s a dire wolf in that sense."