The dire wolf’s scientific name, Canis dirus, means ‘fearsome dog’. Two subspecies, Canis dirus dirus and Canis dirus guildayi, have since been identified from fossil finds. The discovery of the first dire wolf specimen occurred in 1854, in Indiana, USA. The species was closely related to, and for a time even coexisted with, the gray wolf ( Canis lupus). It lived during the late Pleistocene epoch from around 125,000 to 9,440 years ago. The dire wolf is an extinct American carnivore.
Dire wolf information tv#
Made famous by the ‘Game of Thrones’ books and TV show, the dire wolf was in fact a real species. Advancement in research over a hundred years later revived the name, exemplifying the importance of museum collections and the sometimes circuitous churn of creating new knowledge.Dire wolf facts, pictures & information. Entitled “Note on the Systematic Position of the Wolves of the Canis Dirus Group”, Merriam cites dire wolf specimens recovered from Rancho La Brea to propose reclassifying the animals as Aenocyon dirus, but the name was quickly discarded. This evolution in nomenclature from Canis dirus to A enocyon dirus was first proposed by paleontologist John Merriam in a 1918 issue of the University of California Bulletin of the Department of Geology. “The new study could find no evidence of interbreeding between dire wolves and other ancient Canis, and thus these questions remain unanswered.” Paleontologists from NHM and La Brea Tar Pits will keep digging for more answers.
“The new study thus raises the question of why dire wolves have independently evolved so many similar morphological characters in grey wolves? Are these due to their similar method of capturing prey?” asks Wang. Like so many paleontological discoveries, dire wolves’ new classification creates new questions. “When ancient DNA is recovered from dire wolves, the sheer quantity of genetic information stored in ancient DNA easily overwhelms our previous studies of a few morphological characters”, Wang says. While the researchers behind this study didn’t recover any DNA from La Brea Tar Pits’ dire wolf collection, a specimen recovered from the Tar Pits did yield proteins that were analyzed for the paper. “We don’t know why aDNA has not yet been recovered from bones in asphalt, which preserves so many different tissues - this is an area of active research, and we now have collaborators looking at getting genetic information from Tar Pit-preserved plants and other bone proteins (such as those analyzed in this study),” says Emily Lindsey, Assistant Curator of La Brea Tar Pits. The reasons aren’t well understood yet, but researchers haven’t been able to extract aDNA from specimens recovered from asphalt sites like the Tar Pits, possibly due to the chemicals used to remove them from the asphalt. While fossils were plentiful, ancient DNA (aDNA) was less so, and only accessible relatively recently. Such a method of scientific classifications by identifying shared similarities between animals is still widely practiced today.” If we see an overwhelming number of morphological similarities between dire wolves and grey wolves, we are likely to conclude that they are closely related, that is, sharing the common generic name Canis. “In the past, the only way we assess the relationships of various wolves are by looking at the shapes of their skulls and teeth preserved in fossils. The rich presence of dire wolf remains in the fossil record, especially at La Brea Tar Pits, gave researchers a lot of material to study. Dire wolves were long thought to be cousins of gray wolves based on their morphology (anatomical features like bones and teeth).
“Paleontologists have long identified a number of morphological characters that seem to suggest a close relationship of the dire wolves and grey wolves, such as those done by Richard Tedford (Curator of American Museum of Natural History) and myself in 2009”, Wang says. The news was surprising for Xaoming Wang, NHM’s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, as well, and he literally wrote the book on fossil dogs ( Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History, by Columbia University Press). For more than a hundred years, grey wolves were believed to be the closest living relatives to dire wolves. “Reading a draft of the paper for the first time gave me a chill, in a good way,” says Mairin Balisi, a postdoctoral research fellow at La Brea Tar Pits.
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