New Yorker - "The Dire Wolf Is Back"
By D.T. Max
"I asked Lamm when a university lab would have completed a comparable effort.
“Never,” he replied.
On March 25th, I went to meet the two older pups, named Romulus and Remus. (The third pup, named Khaleesi—for the light-haired protagonist of “Game of Thrones”—was not yet ready for visitors, I was told.) I was given directions to a one-acre enclosure at a location in the northern U.S. The dire wolves normally live on a two-thousand-acre property far from the spot where I was headed. “They live like kings there,” Lamm told me. As I drove up to the enclosure, I saw Church, looking like Gandalf, with a bushy white beard, and Lamm, who, with his luxuriant, glossy facial hair, resembles Jon Snow, Ghost’s master. Matt James was present, and a phalanx of animal-care officers stood in a corner, in case there were problems.
I suddenly saw two shocks of white—the young dire wolves. Both attentive and wary, the animals seemed not from this world. They were impressively large: roughly eighty pounds apiece, at five months old. Lamm told me that they would likely weigh about a hundred and forty pounds at maturity—at least twenty pounds more than a large adult male gray wolf."