Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, New Genetic Clues Reveal

[Potoooooooo]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...e-not-really-wolves-new-genetic-clues-reveal/

Dire wolves are iconic beasts. Thousands of these extinct Pleistocene carnivores have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. And the massive canids have even received some time in the spotlight thanks to the television series Game of Thrones. But a new study of dire wolf genetics has startled paleontologists: it found that these animals were not wolves at all

 

[bigfield]

This is dire news.

 

[laughing dog]

Frankly, I think "Dire dogs" is a cooler name anyway.

 

[lpetrich]

Titled link: Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, New Genetic Clues Reveal - Scientific American
But instead wolf imitations, the result of convergent evolution.

Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage | Nature

Dire wolves are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Here, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil remains dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization across Canidae, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes. This suggests that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire wolves, while the ancestors of grey wolves, coyotes and dholes evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

The legendary dire wolf may not have been a wolf at all | Science | AAAS - describes the findings in detail.

 

[ideologyhunter]

One of them sat down to play cards with Jerry Garcia, in the backwash of Fennario. Or so it is said.

 

[Potoooooooo]

One of them sat down to play cards with Jerry Garcia, in the backwash of Fennario. Or so it is said.

Here is a photo of the event