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It was once believed that the giant, bone-crushing terrible wolf species that roamed North America until about 12,000 years ago were closely related to living wolves.
This portrayal was reinforced by the HBO TV series “Game of Thrones”, which offered what was thought to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of the now extinct animals. They were the symbol of House Stark, known for its dwelling in the cold northern lands of George RR Martin’s mythical world, Westeros.
In real life, however, prehistoric terrible wolves were not closely related to modern wolves, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature – and it appears they may not have been quite adapted to the cold. .
“I certainly don’t think the average wolf would have been thrilled to live in frozen Winterfell,” said Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at Durham University in the UK and lead author of the study. Winterfell is the ancestral castle of House Rigide.
Scientists had speculated that terrible wolves interbreeded with gray wolves and other related species, like most living (dog-like) canid species, including coyotes, jackals, and domestic dogs. But the new study reveals that the terrible wolves belonged to an ancient lineage so different from other canids that they did not crossbreed.
And if they had not interbreeded, the researchers say, the terrible wolves might have been unable to acquire traits to help them survive in rapidly changing environments at the end of the last ice age – to little near when they were gone.
“The dreaded wolves just didn’t have the ability to adapt, apparently,” Perri said.
Other reasons for their disappearance could be the extinction of many of their prey species in the warming environment, such as horses, camels, and mammoths – possibly some of them at the hands of early Americans, arrived at about the same time. Or it could be that the terrible wolves fell victim to diseases caused by other species of wolves and coyotes that had evolved in Eurasia, she said.
Fearsome wolf fossils have been found in many places in North and South America, mainly in the lowlands and in warm climates. Perri said she thinks real-life terrible wolves may have had short coats suitable for the warmer weather, rather than the thick, shaggy fur depicted in the fantasy TV series.
“I suspect Nymeria, Ghost and Lady [three of the dire wolves in “Game of Thrones”] would look more like one of the more heat-adapted canids, like dholes, ”she said, referring to a species also known as the Asian Shorthair Wild Dog.
Perri and his colleagues have spent years collecting potential samples of ancient DNA from terrible wolf fossils, which have been found at around 150 archaeological sites.
Co-author Laurent Frantz, professor of paleogenetics at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, said the study used ancient DNA recovered from the teeth and dense bones of five of the fossils.
By comparing ancient DNA to genetic material from other canids, they found that the terrible wolf’s closest living relative was the African jackal, which diverged around 5.1 million years ago, while the Nearest living wolves diverged about 5.7 million years ago.
“It’s a lot longer than we would have thought,” Frantz said. “We thought more over tens of thousands of years.”
It is likely that the ancestors of the terrible wolves occupied the Americas before the last ice age, and that the terrible wolves evolved on their own over millions of years while the gray wolf (canis lupus) evolved in Eurasia and migrated to the Americas relatively recently, perhaps in the last 50,000. years, he said.
“It’s a fascinating result,” said Robert Dundas, a vertebrate paleontologist and professor at California State University, Fresno, who did research on Ice Age mammals and was not involved in the study. .
The discovery that terrible wolves did not interbreed with other species, unlike almost all living canids, could have implications for the causes of their extinction, he said.
“The animals that were able to reproduce… maybe they had some sort of selective advantage,” he said.
Mairin Balisi, a paleontologist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History who has worked with terrible wolf fossils from the La Brea tar pits, said the new research calls for rethinking.
“Much of the behavior of the terrible wolves that we deduced implicitly assumed that the gray wolf is their closest living relative,” she said. “But it shows it isn’t.”
Yet it is likely that the terrible wolves were beasts of burden, like gray wolves, and not solitary predators like foxes. One reason is that some of La Brea’s terrible wolf fossils show they healed from debilitating wounds like broken bones, suggesting that their pack provided them with food when they couldn’t hunt, a she declared.
The La Brea Tar Pits are a hotspot for terrible wolves where more than 4,000 of their fossils have been found since excavations began in the early 20th century.
“It would be lucky to have a sample of 10 for a certain species, but we were lucky,” Balisi said. “It was unlucky for the animal, but lucky for the paleontologists.”
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