The giant wolves that lived in the Ice Age and were made famous by Game of Thrones were actually related to foxes
When we imagine a direwolf, the image that probably comes to mind is one of those giant predators that inhabited Winterfell in Game of Thrones and fought alongside the Starks. So much so that during the series’ broadcast, many fans of the series, delighted by the direwolf puppies that appeared in the first episodes, began to buy their modern relative, the Siberian Husky, in large quantities, to the point that the fashion led to many of these animal abandonments emerging.
Direwolves are extinct, but they were real. They lived in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene (125,000–9,500 years ago) in the Americas (with a single known record also in East Asia). But ancient direwolves bore little resemblance to modern wolves.
According to Angela Perri, an archaeologist at Durham University, they were giant canids that roamed North America in the Pleistocene They resembled giant red foxes more than large wolves.. And the most surprising thing is that, despite their name, they were not wolves: the direwolf genetic line separated from today’s wolves, coyotes and dogs six million years ago.
Perri and dozens of geneticists, archaeologists, anthropologists and zoologists from around the world were able to delve into the DNA of this mysterious mega-predator for the first time in a new study published in Nature. Direwolves were first discovered in the 1850s, and many specimens have been preserved in near-perfect condition thanks to places like the La Brea Tar Pits in present-day Los Angeles, which are natural asphalt pits that housed the bodies of prehistoric mammoths , sloths and American lions when they still lived on Earth. The canid’s morphology was so similar to that of a large gray wolf that no one thought to debate what looked like a particular thing.
They weren’t wolves, but foxes
“Our opinion of direwolves hasn’t changed much since then,” says Perri. “Because their morphology, skeletons and teeth are so similar to those of wolves, we assumed they were closely related to gray wolves.”
As evolution tells us again and again, just because something looks like a certain species doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a member of the family. But finding the DNA of the mysterious direwolf is no easy task. In cases like La Brea, tar can beautifully preserve a skeleton but alter the internal DNA of all kinds of creatures that share the asphalt-filled grave, spreading different biochemical signatures throughout, explains Patty Shipman, a retired anthropologist who specializes in humans specializes in interactions with dogs. Years ago, he first attempted to collect DNA from the direwolves of La Brea.
“At the time, we said we couldn’t get anything that would tell us anything about orphaned wolves,” Shipman explains. That’s why Perri and his colleagues spent years searching for intact DNA samples across the continent. “Out of dozens and dozens of samples, we got five usable ones,” he explains. After genetic analysis, researchers discovered not only how different direwolves were from the other dog-like creatures living in our world today, but also that they were the last surviving lineage of their species. That’s right, there are no orphaned dogs or coyotes left today: they disappeared from the earth about 12,000 or 13,000 years ago.
This could be due to several reasons, such as the severe climate change that occurred at the beginning of the Holocene (our current geological epoch) and wiped out other mega-predators, such as saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears, as their herbivorous food sources also began to decline. And it probably didn’t help that humans also showed up and hunted their already dwindling food sources, Perri said.
Another complicated situation that may have contributed to the demise of the direwolf is the introduction of modern direwolf-like species such as wolves and coyotes and the diseases they may have brought with them. According to the new study, direwolves were so evolutionarily different from gray wolves and other canids that survived the transition to the Ice Age that they could not interbreed to create an even stronger direwolf population that would last into the new era .
“Interbreeding could have helped direwolves survive the enormous ecological changes at the end of the Ice Age that wiped out almost all of the large animals in the Americas,” explains Robert Loseley, a professor of archeology at the University of Alberta, who did not take part in the study. “The wolves survived. Also coyotes. But no direwolves.
Now that we know how special orphaned wolves are, it opens up a whole new set of questions for scientists, including whether they interacted with early humans, who their close relatives were, and whether these 180-pound pups had fur like huskies.
REFERENCE
Dire wolves were the last representatives of an ancient lineage of canids from the New World