Rare dire wolf bone logged by undergraduate student at Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The world was mesmerized by Colossal Biosciences’ recent announcement that they had cloned dire wolf pups, a species of canine that’s been extinct for more than 10,000 years. While experts have debated the “de-extinction” of these wolves, which are far more genetically similar to living grey wolf than to the original dire wolf, one thing is certainly true: An undergraduate student at Penn State recently catalogued a jawbone from one of Pennsylvania’s few dire wolf fossils. Aspiring paleontologist Ethan Merckx, a senior majoring in geobiology in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS), spoke about this recent discovery.