Life imitated art recently when a company called Colossal Biosciences announced the creation of specially genetically-modified wolves. These cute fluffy white puppies, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, are claimed to be dire wolves reborn. That is, members of an extinct species of wolf that, before the Younger Dryas comet wiped them all out, preyed on horses, bison, giant sloths and who knows? maybe even a few unfortunate Clovis people.
The Return of the Dire Wolf
Not long before, the same group had announced success in the first step in their quest to revive another Pleistocene lifeform — the awesome woolly mammoth. The supposed justification for this is to revive the tundra ecosystem in the face of global warming, but that seems a bit like rationale for something that just sounds cool. And of course, the company claims it is a demonstrator program, that the same tech can be used to save some of the most endangered creatures today.
All very fine and noble, but their achievement was in fact re-engineer the genomes of mice so they became woolly mice — little cute tribbles to which no one could possibly object. That is, unless they escape into the wild to terrorize the Arctic. Being able to function through the harshest cold weather could be a real benefit to the little guys. And what could go wrong? This whole bring-back-the-Ice-Age could really be prescient, if in fact, this global warming thing is a fluke caused by our burning and cows farting, and the planet’s actually slated for another round of glaciation in the long run as many climatologists think.
Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create ‘woolly mice’
The art that this particular start-up imitates is, of course, “Jurassic Park“. One might reasonably wonder if the company’s founders even sat through the entire first movie, much less any of the sequels…
What does all this have to do with the Apocalypse? One often-neglected prophecy is found with the fourth and final horseman, Death:
And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth. [Rev. 6:8 NIV, emphasis added.]
Something to distract you from your other more immediate anxieties.
