GEORGE R.R. Martin may have featured direwolves into the fictional world of his Game of Thrones series, but he’d never imagined that one day, he would come face to face with real ones— or at least the closest thing science could conjure. 

The fantasy became reality thanks in part to Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, one of the key investors in Colossal Biosciences. 

The private biotech company, now valued at over $10 billion, was founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm, with the ambitious goal of resurrecting extinct species—starting with the woolly mammoth.

On Facebook, Martin revealed that he had known about the news for a while but had been under strict orders to keep it quiet. 

After all, the Game of Thrones creator—who helped make dire wolves iconic—knows how to keep a good secret.

“I’ve been holding my tongue for months now, sworn to silence yet dying to tell the world. Pardon my shouting, but… The dire wolf is back,” he said. 

“Extinct for more than ten thousand years, but extinct no longer, thanks to Ben Lamm, George Church, Beth Shapiro, and the rest of their team of mad scientists at Colossal, the world leader in the science of ‘de-extinction.’”

Colossal Biosciences made a splash in the media when they revealed that they were able to birth three dire wolves— a revolution in the field of biological science. 

They named the male wolves Romulus and Remus— twin brothers in Roman mythology who are said to be the founders of Rome— and the female one Khaleesi, after Martin’s famous character in the hit series. 

In Game of Thrones, direwolves are large, intelligent, and fiercely loyal creatures that serve as symbolic and literal protectors of the Stark children. Each Stark child is given a direwolf pup early in the series, and the bond between them reflects their personal growth, struggles, and fates. 

The direwolves represent the Stark family’s connection to the old ways of the North, their strength, and their resilience in the face of adversity.