Dire wolf mystery uncovered with help from Tennessee fossils

SULLIVAN COUNTY, Tenn. (WCYB) — If you're a fan of the hit television show "Game of Thrones", you might be surprised to know that the show's ill-fated dire wolves, the Stark children's pets, were inspired by and named after a real animal that once lived in North America.

It has long been thought that dire wolves were close relatives of the gray wolves that still live in North America today, but a surprising new study has found that is not the case at all.

This study, “Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage,” presents the collaborative work of nearly 50 scientists from around the world, including Blaine Schubert, executive director of the Center of Excellence in Paleontology at East Tennessee State University and a professor in the Department of Geosciences.

"They were a little bit larger than the gray wolf that we think of in North America here today. But not a lot larger," says Schubert. "They were definitely more muscular, more powerful looking overall. But we as paleontologist had hypothesized, that they were probably very closely related, because they look pretty similar. But this study actually shows us something very different, that they're not very closely related."

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A group of scientists recently used a dire wolf tooth found in a Sullivan County cave, along with four other fossils from around the continent, for DNA sampling and radiocarbon dating. The scientists dug deeper into the lives of the creatures to determine why they became extinct.

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"If an organism, an animal with a skeleton dies in a cave, it's a really different possible scenario, because the temperature and humidity is relatively stable," saysSchubert. "It doesn't have the sunlight, it doesn't have the rain, water weathering. And so if a cave is very stable, and this one was relatively stable and relatively dry. The real key is not having fluctuations in temperature and humidity not having sunlight, not having organisms that will eat those bones. So caves can provide us with these time capsules, to such an extent that bones can even still be on the surface of a cave floor and be 10s of 1000s of years old."

These results also provide clues as to why dire wolves went extinct while gray wolves and other canines survived. Scientists say lots of interbreeding between gray wolves, coyotes and other closely related species might have provided them with a wide variety of genetic tools that allowed them to adapt in the changing environments toward the end of the Ice Age. Dire wolves, on the other hand, missed out on all that gene-swapping, which may have left them vulnerable to extinction.

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