fossil record

There is no fossil record of sentient AI, no ice cores of machine feeling, so to speak.

"It is a single community of a single species of animal from a snapshot in time, and it's a huge sample size. That almost never happens in the fossil record," says Prof Bamforth.

We know from the fossil record that dire wolves were social creatures, but we’re too late to observe exactly how each generation of pups learned skills from the one before it.

As creatures that were created by modifying modern organisms, and who live in modern times, they are untethered from the evolutionary history embodied by the real dire wolves who now rest in the fossil record.

"Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record," said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.