The horrible wolves of Game of Thrones were real. We now know why they disappeared

Game of Thrones author George RR Martin didn’t invent the terrible wolves, the pets that were given to the children of the Starks (even John Snow) in the book and the TV series. It is a true, but now extinct, dog species that lived 125,000 years ago to about 9,500 years ago. New study reveals why they weren’t there: The Dire Wolves couldn’t make terrible coywolf scraps with the Gray Wolves today, even if they wanted to.

“Despite the anatomical similarities between gray wolves and terrible wolves – indicating that they can be related in the same way as modern humans and Neanderthals – our genetic results show that these two wolf species are very similar to this,” said Keren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, co-author of the study. Distant unconscious, like humans and chimpanzees. Published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Gray wolves can breed and mate with other similar animals, including African wolves, dogs, coyotes, and jackals, but terrible wolves were genetically different from mating with other groups. According to the study, terrible wolves separated from these wolf subspecies almost 6 million years ago and were just a distant relative of wolves today.

“While ancient humans and Neanderthals seem to have interbreeded, just like gray wolves and modern coyotes, our genetic data has provided no evidence that terrible wolves interbreed with living dog species,” a- he declared. Mitchell. “All of our data indicates that the terrible wolf is the last surviving member of an ancient lineage that differs from all living dogs.”

The research was carried out by the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, with assistance from scientists from the University of Oxford, Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany, the University of Adelaide and the ‘University of California. The team sequenced the ancient DNA of five subfossils of terrible wolves from Wyoming, Idaho, Ohio and Tennessee, dating back more than 50,000 years.

The study was the first time ancient DNA had been taken from terrible wolves, and it suggested that the species only evolved in North America for millions of years, without migrating like other species did. make between North America and Eurasia. Since wolves cannot mate with other species, the researchers hypothesize that some of the genetic traits that kept this species alive were not passed on to ancient dogs.

More than 4,000 terrible wolves have been exhumed from Priya Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the study notes, but scientists do not know much about why they were lost. Gray wolves, also found in the pits, are still present today.