Dire wolf found in Canada for 1st time | 24CA News

Canada now has its first dire wolf.

For the primary time, a Canadian fossil has been confirmed as having come from the Ice Age predator featured within the TV collection Game of Thrones. The specimen, from close to Medicine Hat in southern Alberta, was tentatively recognized a long time in the past, however a crew from the Royal Ontario Museum used new know-how to lastly lock it down.

“It had never been fully described,” mentioned evolutionary biologist Ashley Reynolds, lead creator of the paper printed within the Journal of Quaternary Science. “This had never been done for this specimen.”

Why it was so exhausting to establish

It wasn’t simple. The complete specimen, which is between 25,000 and 50,000 years previous, consists of 1 jaw, badly crushed, with some remaining enamel.

“We could tell pretty clearly right away it was a member of the dog family, about the size of a wolf,” Reynolds mentioned.

So, it was both a gray wolf or a dire wolf. There are methods to inform them aside primarily based on enamel, however this animal was too previous for that.

“When an animal gets really old, it starts to wear down its teeth, and this can mean that features of the teeth get worn away,” Reynolds mentioned.

Although dire wolves are usually considerably larger than gray wolves, this particular person was throughout the dimension vary of each species. So the researchers tried one thing else.

How the thriller was solved ultimately

The crew took factors alongside the define of the fossil and used a pc program to estimate its form. They in contrast that with recognized values from gray and dire wolves.

“Based on the parts of the shape we do have, which does it look more like,” Reynolds mentioned.

This dire wolf is the northernmost confirmed instance of the species ever discovered. That’s as a result of in these days, most of what’s now Canada was lined by an enormous ice sheet.

But once in a while the ice retreated, opening up habitat from Yukon down via central and southeast Alberta and making manner for an Ice Age bestiary that is exhausting to think about on the rolling, grassy plains alongside the South Saskatchewan River, the place the dire wolf was discovered.

There had been large floor sloths, wild horses, camels, mammoths and mastodons. Reynolds’s earlier analysis discovered sabretooth cats in the identical deposit because the dire wolf.

What the invention means

Confirming the presence of dire wolves provides to our image of what the Ice Age regarded like in Canada, Reynolds mentioned.

“We’re starting to get a better picture of what lived in Canada in ages past. We see a fauna that is very similar to what we would see even in California.”

But this space would even have seen a singular mixing of southern and Arctic species. There’s some proof, for instance, that cave lions may have lived within the space.

There’s not a lot Reynolds can say in regards to the dire wolf she studied.

It was comparatively small for the species. It was very previous, so it should have been a profitable wolf. At some level in its life, it misplaced one among its large enamel and needed to make do.

Much about Ice Age Canada stays to be discovered, Reynolds mentioned.

“Canadian fossils, especially from the time after the dinosaurs, are relatively understudied,” Reynolds mentioned. “We’re really just starting to figure out what the landscape looked like.”