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It is already a questionable idea to return the long-extinct dire wolf—a creature 25 percent bigger than the modern gray wolf, whose enormous teeth once slew horses and bison across the primordial American plains—to the modern world. But a company called Colossal Biosciences has gone ahead and done it, and now, per the New York Times, three young dire wolves are living it up in “a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern United States,” at least until they inevitably break out and heighten international tensions with Canada.

While I, like every reasonable person, am gagging to have my skull crushed in the jaws of these adorable prehistoric pups, I have a major problem with the idiot scientific geniuses who have de-extincted the dire wolf: They have given one of them, “Khaleesi,” an absolutely stupid name.

It is already somewhat embarrassing that after years of attempting to choose what extinct species—dodos? Mammoths?—to bring back from oblivion, scientists finally settled on the dire wolf, a very large canine that went extinct roughly 13,000 years ago. It is somewhat embarrassing because the scientists can say all they want about the difficulty of implanting mammoth embryos in elephants or whatever, but it’s obvious that one reason they chose dire wolves is that a bunch of them thought Game of Thrones was really cool. (Dire wolves appear in George R.R. Martin’s tragically uncompleted fantasy novels, as well as in HBO’s tragically completed television adaptation.)

Once the dire wolves (technically, wolf pups with some edited dire wolf genes) were born, the scientists at Colossal then went and made things more embarrassing, essentially confirming this theory by giving one of the wolves a GoT-inspired name. The other two dire wolves, Romulus and Remus, are named for the founders of Rome, who according to legend were raised by a wolf. Those names are fine, I guess. But Khaleesi? Khaleesi?! Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could give a dire wolf a dumb name, they didn’t stop to think if they should give a dire wolf a dumb name.

No disrespect intended to the thousands of American children now named “Khaleesi,” which is as good a name as any for a human person—names are made up! (Leave aside, for now, any weirdness those parents might have felt when their children’s namesake was revealed to be a genocidal “mad queen.”) But “Khaleesi” is a dumb name for a dire wolf, because Khaleesi—Daenerys Targaryen, the character in Game of Thrones—has nothing to do with dire wolves. She does not own a dire wolf. She does not meet a dire wolf. She has no connection to dire wolves. She is a Targaryen! Her house, as the title of the follow-up HBO series suggests, is not the house of the wolf—it is the house of the dragon.

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If you are going to be so embarrassingly fanboyish as to name your fluffy de-extincted monster after a Game of Thrones character, name it after a Stark! The wolf’s fur, scientists are delighted to discover, is totally white—so name it Jon Snow. Name it Arya. Name it Ned or Sansa or Catelyn or (deep cut that none of you non–book readers will understand) Lady Stoneheart. Better yet, name your dire wolf after the actual direwolves of the series, all of whom have awesome names, because they were named by the Stark children. Ghost! Grey Wind! Lady! Shaggydog! (OK, that last one is bad, but give Rickon a break—he was 3.)

But do not name your GoT-inspired dire wolf “Khaleesi.” That is both too nerdy and not nerdy enough. Save “Khaleesi” for the moment, surely only a few years away, when Colossal Biosciences, or some similar company, de-extinctifies (de-mythologizes?) the first dragon. As that damnèd beast fills the skies with fire and carries compact SUVs away in its terrible claws, at least we’ll know the scientists who brought it back to life chose the correct name.

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