400,000 years ago, the prehistoric "dire wolf" to protect the bison dueled with the American gray wolf, the reddish-brown head and jaw of the "dire wolf" with a powerful appearance and ferocious attack to make the gray wolf retreat.
In 1854, the pigeon estuary in the United States found the world's first dinosaur fossil, and then more surprisingly, 3600 dinosaur remains were found in the La Brea asphalt pit in the United States, and people knew the strength of the wolf family! So in 1958 Dr. Reddy named the members of the wolf family who had recently become extinct as "dire wolves."
Through later research, dire wolves appeared 400,000 years ago. At that time it existed in the world alongside modern wolves for a long time, and it was not extinct until ten thousand years ago.
Dire wolves and gray wolves should be close relatives, although this claim has not yet been confirmed. Its body structure is completely different from that of modern wolves, larger than modern wolves, with a more robust and strong body, and its limbs are relatively slender and short, more like hyenas. It has a head larger than a modern wolf, but its brain capacity is very low, so its intelligence is far inferior to that of a modern wolf.
Through research, because of its large size, strong bite force, teeth are very suitable for cutting meat, so it is inferred that it can catch a variety of large and medium-sized deer such as North American bison, bighorn bison, etc., and may also pick up some animal carcasses for food, playing the role of prairie scavengers.
Soon after, when humans stepped into the land of the Americas, the dire wolf and many other large Animals of the Americas also went extinct. Eventually became extinct at the end of the last ice age. Despite the long-term success of the species, little is known about them, including their origins and the reasons for their demise.
New results from recent studies of "dire wolves" suggest that dire wolves have reigned much longer than we previously thought. But the reason for their extinction should have to do with balancing the environment, competitors, and prey. Gray wolves now occupy this throne, but they come from different branches of the family tree.
A new paper co-authored by biologist Laurent Frantz and Angela Perri of Durham University suggests that dire wolves have long lived in genetic isolation, which may have played a key role in their extinction.
"When dire wolves went extinct, they left no direct heirs. Their pedigree and legacy is gone forever.
For the study of dire wolves, a scientific team also formed several different research groups, all of which independently tried to obtain the DNA of dire wolves and joined forces to get the best picture of the evolution of dire wolves as possible.
By pooling the resources of the various groups, efforts were made to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves by assembling DNA — including nuclear and mitochondrial genomes — in five dire wolf specimens dating back 13,000 to 50,000 years ago. Unfortunately, not a single DNA from the dire wolf specimens extracted from the La Brea tar pit could be extracted because the heat destroyed all the genetic evidence.
So the team only compared these samples with the genomes of living wolf-like species by referring to studies published by other scientists.
The team compared dire wolf DNA to 22 genomes belonging to the modern North American gray wolf, coyote wolf, prehistoric dog and African jackal.
Scientists were unable to find evidence of genetic exchange between dire wolves and american gray wolves, among other similar species. It also confirms that the life and evolution of dire wolves is isolated from related species, prevented from hybridizing, a crucial and often underestimated clue to natural excavations. For earthly organisms, it is only by mating with similar species that a large number of ideal traits can be acquired while increasing their genetic diversity.
For example, even today, modern gray wolves and coyotes are hybridizing.
Biological hybridization occurs very commonly between closely related species, wherever they meet.
But research proves that we don't see this in dire wolves and other wolf-like species, which leads us to conclude that dire wolves must have been geographically isolated for a long time and didn't give them the opportunity to hybridize. Or it could be argued that when dire wolves encounter other wolf-like species, they may have evolved so differently that they could not cross.
As the new study also shows, the last common ancestor of all these groups dates back 5 million years, much later than scientists speculate. This divergence happened early on, which shows the uniqueness of dire wolves. The common ancestors produced three main lineages: groups of dire wolves, groups of gray wolves and related wolf species, and groups of African jackals.
That is, it is not possible to determine "which of these two lineages or lineages is most closely related to each other", especially "whether it is a dire wolf or a jackal who is the closest relative to the third [wolf] lineage.".
Most scientists speculate that dire wolves went extinct because of the extinction of the large herbivorous mammals they hunted or the drastic decline in the number of prey.
Some scientists speculate that the emergence of gray wolves and American humans in North America has caused an existential crisis for dire wolves or that some bacteria and viruses have caused the death of dire wolves.
But none of these speculations have reasonable scientific evidence.
When the dire wolf became extinct, the North American gray wolf also rose rapidly to become one of the most powerful carnivores in North America today, and for many years because they posed a threat to human security, they were once hunted on a large scale, and now the number is much lower than before, but at present, there is no risk of extinction.
In summary, because the genetic data analyzed was not detailed enough, it was not possible to identify mutations in dire wolves that may be problematic. Therefore, the researchers do not know whether dire wolves lack genetic diversity, which can lead to the accumulation of many harmful or disease-causing mutations. Studies of other extinct species, such as mammoths, have been able to do this, finding evidence of extensive inbreeding. However, it is also possible that dire wolves are "genetically very healthy."
The vast majority of mammoths went extinct at the end of the last ice age simply because it lost the ability to smell flowers.
So far, due to the lack of data, the study of dire wolves is only speculation, and there will be more data studies in the future that can be comprehensively tested.