The ancient, extinct terrible wolf was perhaps one of the loneliest wolves – so genetically different from its closest allied wolf that it could no longer interbreed, forcing it into an evolutionary dead end when it went extinct 13,000 years ago.
That’s the finding based on a new study, the in-depth analysis of DNA retrieved from ancient bones from terrible wolves across North America. Once terrible wolves (The dog is dim) that diverged from gray wolves millions of years ago, they seem to have never mingled since.
In fact, their genetic lineage is so different from other canids that the research team suggests putting terrible wolves in a different sex entirely – that they are reclassified as Aenocyon virus, as was first proposed in 1918.
“Dire wolves are sometimes portrayed as mythical creatures – gigantic wolves prowling bleak frozen landscapes – but the reality turns out to be even more interesting,” said paleobiologist Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Despite anatomical similarities between gray wolves and terrible wolves – suggesting they may be related in the same way as modern humans and Neanderthals – our genetic results show that these two types of wolves are much more like distant cousins like humans and nieces. chimpanzees. “
Remains of terrible wolves can be found in the fossil record from 250,000 to about 13,000 years ago, and appear to have dominated the carnivore scene during the last Ice Age in what is now North America.
In the famous La Brea tar pits alone, there are more animals excavated than the slightly smaller gray wolf (Wolf) more than a hundredfold.
But how they diverged, evolved, and eventually became extinct by the end of the last Ice Age, about 11,700 years ago, was a challenge to merge. So an international team of scientists set to work on one of the only clues we have: bones.
“Dire wolves have always been an iconic representation of the last Ice Age in America, but what we know about their evolutionary history has been limited to what we can see from the size and shape of their bones,” said Durham archaeologist Angela Perri. University.
But sometimes paleontological remains can contain other information – DNA that has been preserved well enough to be sequenced. And that’s what the team researched.
They obtained and sequenced five samples of dire wolf DNA from more than 50,000 years ago to 12,900 years ago from Idaho, Ohio, Wyoming, and Tennessee.
Then they compared them with genomic data from eight canids living today, obtained from a genomic database: gray wolf, coyote (Canis latrans), African wolf (Canis lupaster), dhole (Cuon alpinus), Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), Andean fox (Lycalopex culpaeus) and gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus).
They also generated new genome sequences for the gray wolf, the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) and the striped jackal (Canis).
They found that, unlike other wolves that migrated between regions, the dire wolf stayed in place and never strayed from North America.
And, fascinatingly, although they shared space with coyotes and gray wolves for at least 10,000 years, they never seem to have interbred with them to produce hybrids.
“When we first started this study, we thought terrible wolves were just amplified gray wolves, so we were surprised to learn how extremely genetically different they were, so much so that they probably wouldn’t have been able to interbreed,” said Molecular geneticist Laurent Frantz from Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany and Queen Mary University in the UK.
“This must mean that terrible wolves have been isolated in North America for a very long time to become so genetically different.”
According to the team’s analysis, the terrible wolves and gray wolves must have diverged from a common ancestor more than 5 million years ago. When you consider that dogs and wolves diverged between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, it is a very long time indeed.
Crossbreeding between canine species whose territories overlap is quite common. The hybrid of a coyote and a wolf is so common that it has a name – coywolf – and wolf-dog hybrids are also not unknown (although breeding them as pets is extremely controversial in the US). So it’s highly unusual for terrible wolves to spend so long around canids without interbreeding.
And while the team didn’t explore this possibility, the genetic isolation could have contributed to the old beast’s eventual demise, as it failed to adapt to a changing world with new traits.
“While ancient humans and Neanderthals interbred, just like modern gray wolves and coyotes, our genetic data did not provide evidence that terrible wolves interbred with living canine species,” Mitchell said. “All our data indicates that the terrible wolf is the last remaining member of an ancient lineage distinct from all living canines.”
The research is published in Nature.