Shaena Montanari
I write about paleontology, dinosaurs, and comparative biology.
Dragons. White walkers. Giants. Dire wolves? The mystical world of the Game of Thrones
series is vast and mysterious. Throughout the series, viewers and
readers have been introduced to the furry and often ferocious
horse-sized wolves that the Stark children call their companions. But
are dire wolves real animals? The answer is that they absolutely are, or
rather were, very real.
Dire wolves once walked the land of the New World, but they are now extinct. Known as Canis dirus,
dire wolves lived during the Pleistocene, about 250,000 to 10,000 years
ago, and are close relatives of modern canids like the gray wolf. While
the dire wolves on television are slightly larger than they were in
real life, C. dirus was about 5 feet long and could weigh up to around 200lbs—it was basically a sturdier version of the modern gray wolf (C. lupus).
These animals lived in forests, in
grasslands, at high elevation—essentially everywhere. There are even
dire wolves from both North and South America even though they are more
common in North America. They were a fairly common top hypercarnivorous
predator consuming a wide variety of megafauna that roamed the
Pleistocene landscape.
Dire wolves are well known from the
famous sticky Los Angeles fossil locality, the La Brea Tar Pits, so it
may come as a surprise to learn the first dire wolf fossil was
discovered in 1854 by Joseph Leidy near Evansville, Indiana. Only a few
specimens were found in North America until the intense recovery fossil
recovery effort began at La Brea Tar Pits in the early 20th century. Now
paleontologists had scads of dire wolves to examine.
With lots of skulls and teeth from these
animals, paleontologists could learn more about how they fed and see if
that explained why they went extinct 10,000 years ago with the rest of
the American megafauna. In 2005, biomechanics specialist Steve Wroe
determined that with its massive jaw musculature, the dire wolf had one
of the largest canine bite forces of any living or extinct animal in
the carnivore group.
Carnivore paleontologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh
examined breakage patterns in dire wolf teeth to get an indication of
how they ate and how much bone they crunched. She looked at breakage
patterns and tooth fracture in their fossil teeth from the La Brea Tar
Pits and noted that they were far more broken than any modern
counterparts who also feed on bone. This suggests something about the
dire wolf hunting prowess—these fractures could potentially be a marker
for how aggressive they were with each other and other carnivorous
megafauna, as broken teeth can be a measure of competition.
If dire wolves were such fearsome predators, then why did they go extinct? It is hard to say, exactly.
Most North American megafauna went extinct 10,000 years ago because of
climate change and human impact. One hypothesis is that the primary food
source of the dire wolf, large herbivores, was becoming less common and
they were too food-stressed to survive. Although, a 2015 study by paleontologist Larisa R. G. DeSantis
and colleagues examined the microscopic tooth wear on the surface of
dire wolf teeth and saw it indicated no big changes in their diets just
prior to the extinction event. This means there is not much support for
the hypothesis of a food shortage and their extinction still remains
somewhat of a mystery.
Other parts of Martin’s fantasy world of Game of Thrones
might not be real, but dire wolves definitely were, and a 250,000 year
long record of bone-crunching broken teeth proves their fearsome
reputation earned in Westeros is likely no exaggeration.
Shaena Montanari is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment