I don't get it, so dire wolves were only 20 gene changes from gray wolves? Not thousands of tiny,crucial changes all over their respective genetic codes?
Above I'm just reporting what the New Yorker reports that Colossus has accomplished.
Reading between the lines, I take the reporting to imply that these 20 edits are what Colossus thinks is sufficient (at least for marketing purposes ;-) to recapitulate some of the key phenotypic traits of dire wolves.
Does that make them actually dire wolves? Not in my opinion.
I'd probably describe the genetically engineered pups as "isogenic with parental gray wolf genomes with the addition of 20 allelic edits that recapitulate key aspects of the dire-wolf phenotype" (or something to the effect; Colossus hasn't published anything by which to evaluate their claims).
I don't work on canids, but a quick PubMed search turns up this paper:
Perri AR, Mitchell KJ, et al. Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage. Nature. 2021 Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub 2021 Jan 13. PMID: 33442059.
The analyses in that paper suggests quite a bit deeper divergence between dire wolves and gray wolves than the New Yorker articles implies.
