Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when George R.R. Martin visited Colossal. It was in 2025.
George R.R. Martin made fictional dire wolves integral to his books in the “A Song of Fire and Ice” saga, which spawned the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”
Little did he know he would eventually get to hold a real dire wolf – well, as close as one likely ever produced – and he would have “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson to thank.
Jackson is among the investors in Colossal Biosciences, a private company which has seen its value increase to more than $10 billion since 2021 when it was founded by George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth.
What Jackson had learned – and Martin didn’t know yet – was that Colossal’s gene editing advances had made it possible to produce offspring born from surrogate mothers. They had a breakthrough allowing them to create dire wolves, which were actual Ice Age predators until they died out as many as 13,000 years ago.
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So Peter Jackson says to George R.R. Martin …
Martin detailed how he got to meet the dire wolves in a post on his official website.
It started with Jackson calling him “with a mysterious suggestion that I phone this guy named Ben Lamm, who had something huge he wanted to share with me. Peter had taken an oath of silence, so he could not share the secret with me, but I could hear the excitement in his voice, so I made the call. And damn, I am sure glad I did.”
Subsequently, Martin visited Colossal in February 2025, more than four months after the biotech company’s researchers oversaw the birth of two male dire wolf pups and one month after a female pup was born.
“I’ve been holding my tongue for months now, sworn to silence yet dying to tell the world,” he said on the site, which had a picture of him holding one of the wolves.
How did George R.R. Martin come up with dire wolves?
A visit to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where the remains of hundreds of dire wolves have been found, sparked inspiration for the author. “When I saw their direwolf exhibit, four hundred skull arrayed on a wall, something stirred inside me,” Martin said.
“Most of my readers will have heard the story of how I (was) writing a science fiction novel in the summer of 1991 when a scene came to me, the first chapter of GAME OF THRONES where they find the direwolf pups in the summer snows. Where did THAT come from? Why did it seize me so powerfully? I have no idea,” he continued. “But it grabbed hold of me so hard that I put the other novel aside and began to write A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. The direwolves were a huge part of it. Without them, Westeros might not exist.”
Martin went on to muse that “maybe I was remembering a past life, when I ran with a pack in the Ice Age. … Whatever the reason, I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.”
Martin had prepared his followers for an upcoming special bit of news, ahead of Colossal’s dire wolf reveal, saying it was not going to be an update on “The Winds of Winter,” the long-awaited next novel in the Game of Thrones series.
The news, he said, “had nothing to do with that. But it was going to be something very cool, something astonishing.”Remembering Martin’s visit, Lamm said, “George R.R. Martin called us wizards, which is pretty cool.”
Not all fans were as excited. “We got Dire Wolves back after 10,000 years before we got the Epstein Files or Winds of Winter,’ one person posted on X.
This story has been updated to correct an inaccuracy.
Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY’s Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him atmikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & [email protected]
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