Apr 7, 2025 6:50 AM MT
The Return of the Dire Wolf
I'm all for rewilding, but Dire Wolves have been extinct for 10,000 years and preyed, in their day, on megafauna. Presumably any return of the Ice Age species will be limited to captivity. . at least for now.
I'm not so sure about this.
Notable, the company that cloned them back into existence says they have not, so far, shown any dog like behavior, which is perhaps not too surprising given their evolutionary history, which is debated. Some classify the large canine as Canis dirus dirus, a species in the canine family that shares a distant canine ancestor, Canis chihliensis, with wolves and dogs, with the wolf, canis lupus, being the direct descendant of that species with the dire wolf has an intervening one. Others proposed that dire wolf has essentially the same linage, but is sufficiently separate such that it deserves its own genus, and should be classified as aenocyon dirus. Frankly the cloning effort would suggest that those who disfavor a separate genus are correct, as a domestic dog hosted the puppies as embryos.
Dire wolves, it should be noted, were absolutely huge, which makes sense as they killed megafauna.
So the question, I suppose, is now what?
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