Dire wolves: first of their name, last in their kind. Yes, you read that right. According to new research published today in Earth, scientists have finally succeeded in sequencing the DNA of serious wolves – and borrowing a phrase from the 11-hour news they found might surprise you.
First, yes, distressed wolves are / were real. Other than Game of Thrones‘other famous creatures, dragons, have wandered throughout North America – more than 4,000 have been excavated from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. Ominous wolves died about 13,000 years ago, and researchers have long believed Canis dirus (translation: “scary dog”) was a sister species to the gray wolf. However, the article published today says that this is not true at all. After analyzing the DNA from five fossilized remains, a team of 49 researchers found that serious wolves were separated from other wolves more than 6 million years ago. The scientists saw them so differently from other dog species that they – in stark contrast to the rampant incest that was commonly known at the show – would not even be able to breed with each other.
According to Angela Perri, an archaeologist at Durham University and the paper’s lead author, this is far more information than anyone has had before. Dire wolves’ has always been an iconic representation of the last ice age in the Americas and now a pop culture icon thanks to Game of Thrones,But information about it was limited to what could be determined from the size and shape of their bones and teeth. ‘With this first ancient DNA analysis of distressed wolves,’ she said in a statement, ‘we revealed that the history of the distressed wolves we thought we knew, especially a close relationship with gray wolves, is actually much more complicated than we had before. thought.”
What researchers found was that distressed wolves, instead of just being a kind of staged gray wolf, had very clear DNA. They are about as gray wolves as chimpanzees. In other words, according to Perri’s co-lead author Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, “all of our data suggests that the distressed wolf is the last surviving member of an ancient race different from all living dogs.”
That uniqueness was possibly their downfall. Gray wolves and coyotes survived the period of the late Pleistocene only well, and researchers believe that this could have resulted in them having more flexibility in the environment or in the diet (than anything that feeds serious wolves dead). is, they also died). Or it is possible that the other animals made it because they were able to mix with other dogs like dogs and gain new immunities along the way. (Last year, a separate research team found that domestic dogs tore off wolves about 11,000 years ago, and were divided into five genetically different sex lines, probably due to people breeding them for certain traits.) Regardless, the reason why you do not ‘ a horrible wolf of your own has everything to do with environmental adaptation and nothing to do with the fact that you are not a Stark, or even a bastard pretending to be a Stark until he realizes that he is actually -oops! heir to the Iron Throne.
If only someone could do research now to determine what happened to the ancestors of Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion.
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