Dire Wolf’s genes show they weren’t really wolves

The fierce wolves dominated the ecology of Pleistocene America. Scientists still know very little about this large extinct carnivore, but a new study is filling some gaps. According to a new study that sequenced five genomes from samples dating back 13,000 to over 50,000 years, terrible wolves were very different from today’s gray wolves, despite their similar appearance.

The last of the canine line of the Americas

The dreaded wolves were first discovered in the 1850s. Their abundant remains, numbering thousands, have been scattered across both continents of America, from Canada to Bolivia. They were highly efficient predators that could grow up to two meters (~ six feet) long and had skeletal adaptations that made them adept at taking down a huge megafauna that roamed the land before the last Ice Age.

Due to their morphology, scientists have always assumed that terrible wolves and modern wolves must be closely related. But a new study published this week in the journal Nature seems to remind us that similar skeletons and other morphological features do not necessarily reflect kinship.

The team of researchers, which involved scientists from Durham University in the United States and the University of Adelaide in Australia, sequenced the DNA of five bones of terrible wolves. Scientists embarked on this study to learn more about the biology of terrible wolves, but were shocked to find by the genome sequence that the extinct beasts last shared a common ancestor with living dogs resembling dogs. wolves about 5.7 million years ago. The dreaded wolves actually diverged from African jackals around 5.1 million years ago.

So the strong resemblance between the two, strange as it may sound, is simply coincidental – a fine example of convergent evolution, whereby two independent species develop similar adaptations. In this case, two unrelated species developed a similar appearance, possibly due to similar habitats and ecological niches.

And despite the frequency of hybridization between Canidae the limbs, terrible wolves, and ancestors of modern wolves and coyotes never interbreeded, meaning they lived in geographic isolation from each other. Yet only one of the two bloodlines survived, so perhaps this lack of mixing may have contributed to their downfall.

It is possible that the ancestor of gray wolves and coyotes had gene variants that were more advantageous in the changing environment that saw terrible wolves unable to adapt during the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. Gray wolves are renowned for their adaptability. Fearsome wolves, not so much as it seems.