The terrible 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 reputed animals given to the children of the Stark family (even Jon Snow) as pets in the book and the TV series. It is an actual, but now extinct, canine species that lived 125,000 years ago until around 9,500 years ago. New study reveals more about why the creatures are no longer there: Dire Wolves couldn’t make small terrible wolf litters with today’s Gray Wolves, even if they wanted to.

“Despite the anatomical similarities between gray wolves and terrible wolves – suggesting that they might perhaps be related in the same way as modern humans and Neanderthals – our genetic results show that these two wolf species look much more like distant cousins, like humans and chimpanzees, ”said Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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

“While ancient humans and Neanderthals appear to have interbreeded, as gray wolves and modern coyotes do, our genetic data has provided no evidence that terrible wolves interbreed with living canine species,” said Mitchell. “All of our data indicates that the terrible wolf is the last surviving member of an ancient lineage distinct from all living dogs.”

The research was carried out by the University of Durham in the UK, with assistance from scientists from the University of Oxford, Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany, the University of Adelaide and the UCLA. 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 that ancient DNA had been taken from terrible wolves, and it suggested that the species evolved only in North America for millions of years, without migrating as other species do between l North America and Eurasia. Because wolves couldn’t mate with other species, the researchers postulate that some of the genetic traits that kept these species alive were not passed down to ancient dogs.

More than 4,000 terrible wolves have been unearthed from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, the study notes, but scientists don’t know much about why they went missing. Gray wolves, also found in the pits, still exist today.