Dire wolves: first of their name, the last of their kind. Yes, you read that right. According to new research published today in Naturescientists have finally been able to sequence the DNA of terrible wolves – and, to borrow a line from the 11 o’clock news, what they discovered might surprise you.
First, yes, terrible wolves are / were real. in contrast to Game of ThronesOther famous creatures, dragons, used to roam North America – in Los Angeles alone, more than 4,000 have been excavated in the La Brea Tar Pits. Dire wolves became extinct about 13,000 years ago, and researchers thought so for a long time The dog is dim (translation: “terrifying dog”) were a sister species of the gray wolf. However, the article published today says this is not true at all. After analyzing the DNA of five fossilized remains, a team of 49 researchers discovered that terrible wolves split off from other wolves more than 6 million years ago. They were, the scientists found, so different from other dog species that – in stark contrast to the rampant incest common on the show that made them famous – they wouldn’t even be able to breed with each other.
Angela Perri, an archaeologist at Durham University and the lead author of the paper, says that’s a lot more information than ever before. Dire wolves had “always been an iconic representation of the last Ice Age in America and now an icon of pop culture thanks to Game of Thrones,But the information about them was limited to what could be determined by the size and shape of their bones and teeth. “With this first ancient DNA analysis of terrible wolves,” she said in a statement, “we have revealed that the history of the terrible wolves we thought we knew – particularly a close relationship with gray wolves – is actually much more complicated than that. before. thought. “
What researchers found was that instead of just being some sort of enhanced gray wolf, dire wolves actually had very different DNA. They resemble gray wolves about as much as humans do chimpanzees. In other words, according to Perri’s co-lead author Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, “all of our data indicates that the terrible wolf is the last remaining member of an ancient lineage different from all living canines.”
That uniqueness may have been their downfall. Gray wolves and coyotes survived the Late Pleistocene just fine, and researchers think this could be because they had more environmental or nutritional flexibility (if everything wolves fed on died, they died too). Or it is possible that those other animals made it because they were able to “crossbreed with other canids” such as dogs, and acquired new immunities along the way. (Last year, a separate research team found that domestic dogs split off from wolves about 11,000 years ago and were divided into five genetically distinct lineages, likely thanks to humans breeding them for certain traits.) Anyway, the reason why you don’t own your own terrible wolf is all about adapting to the environment and nothing to do with not being a Stark, or even an asshole pretending to be a Stark, until he finds out that he’s actually – oops! – Heir to the Iron is Throne.
If only someone could do some research to find out what happened to the ancestors of Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion.
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