Dire wolves in Philadelphia? Well, maybe.

Imagine this, Philadelphians. You venture across an ocean in the 17th and 18th century to make your home in the promise of a new land. When you arrive, weary from your long journey, you go to work building a new home. After taking advice and assessing the best resource-filled area around Philadelphia’s settlements to begin construction, night falls. Over the crackling of fires to keep you comfortable as the sun sets,  a shiver travels down your spine at the distant howling of wolves. For many of our ancestors,  this is what greeted them as they settled into their new North American homes.

One might say that as a society, we have a little too much time on our hands to be using a combination of the old centuries-old DNA, the process of cloning, and a touch of gene-altering of a gray wolf to resurrect the dire wolf. But it is fascinating nonetheless.

A dire wolf — also known as Aenocyon dirus  —  called our great country home (including the area around modern-day Philadelphia) somewhere between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago. With the biggest concentration of fossils discovered in the California region and the first uncovered in Ohio in 1854, the name was applied in 1858. 

The more regular sort of  wolves were themselves one of William Penn’s priorities as his vision of Philadelphia began to take shape. The area around what would become our city wasn’t just rich in resources: it was also rich in wildlife. In 1683, a bounty system was actually placed on the wolf population in Pennsylvania as the earliest European settlers were concerned about the risk that they posed. The last wild wolf was eradicated around 1892.

The cloned baby dire wolves (Remus, Khaleesi, and Romulus) are currently on a secret ecological preserve in America. Current estimates are that the puppies will eclipse six feet and over 125 pounds. The artist renditions and projections of how they will look in adulthood conjure the imagery of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.

Like any North American landscape , one can still imagine wild wolves roaming amongst the valleys and woods around Philadelphia from long ago. In the hot June of 2012, Philadelphians even reported a wolf-dog hybrid running loose inside the Pennypack Park area of the city. On cold and dark winter nights,  above the modern-day sounds of an American city like Philadelphia, I can even still imagine their howls piercing the cold night air. Even if they aren’t there.

Michael Thomas Leibrandt lives and works in Abington Township, Pennsylvania.