Four red wolves now roam a secret refuge, their reddish coats and broad skulls echoing a species long on the brink. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotech firm, claims these clones—born from blood samples of Gulf Coast ‘ghost’ canids—carry vital ancestral genes missing from today’s captive packs. But skeptics call them coyote hybrids dressed up for headlines. The debate exposes deep rifts in conservation science. Red wolves once prowled from Texas prairies to Pennsylvania forests. Smaller than grays, with coats from russet to cream. Settlers hunted them relentlessly for two centuries. By 1980, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared them extinct in the wild. Only 14 survivors remained, captured and bred into captivity. Today, about 280 live in zoos under the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan. Another 20 or so scrape by in North Carolina’s experimental wild population. Inbreeding haunts them all. Coyotes complicated everything.…