Scientists have sequenced Dire Wolf’s DNA. Thanks, science!

Furious wolves: first of his name, the last of his kind. Yes, you read that correctly. According to new research published today in Nature, scientists have finally been able to sequence the DNA of the lousy wolves and, to take a phrase from the 11 o’clock news, what they found might surprise you.

First of all, yes, terrible wolves are / were real. Unlike Game of Thrones“Other famous creatures, dragons, used to roam all over North America; more than 4,000 have been excavated in the pit pits at La Brea in Los Angeles alone. The evil wolves became extinct about 13,000 years ago and for a long time the researchers believed it The dog darkens (translation: “fearsome dog”) were a sister species of the gray wolf. However, the document released today says this is not true. After analyzing the DNA of five fossilized remains, a team of 49 researchers has discovered that terrible wolves separated from other wolves more than 6 million years ago. The scientists found that they were so different from the other canine species that, in contrast to the common rampant incest of the program that made them famous, they would not even have been able to reproduce among themselves.

According to Angela Perri, an archaeologist at the University of Durham and lead author of the newspaper, this is much more information than anyone had before. Furious wolves had been “always an iconic representation of the last ice age in the Americas and now an icon of pop culture thanks to Game of Thrones,”But information about them was limited to what could be determined from the size and shape of their bones and teeth. “With this first ancient analysis of the DNA of bad wolves,” he said in a statement, “we have revealed that the story of the terrible wolves we thought we knew, especially a close relationship with gray wolves, is actually much more complicated. than I previously thought “.

What the researchers found was that, instead of being a kind of reinforced gray wolf, lousy wolves actually had very different DNA. They are as similar to gray wolves as humans to chimpanzees. In other words, according to Perri co-author Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, “all of our data indicate that the wolf is the last surviving member of an ancient lineage different from all living canines.”

This singularity may have been his downfall. Gray wolves and coyotes survived well into the late Pleistocene era, and researchers believe it could have been the result of them having more environmental or dietary flexibility (if all the evil wolves fed died, they would die too). Or it is possible that the other animals got it because they were able to “hybridize with other canids” like dogs, gaining new immunities along the way. (Last year, a separate research team found that domesticated dogs separated from wolves about 11,000 years ago and split into five genetically distinct lineages, probably thanks to humans who bred them for certain traits.) Regardless, the reason you don’t have your terrible wolf has everything to do with environmental adaptation and nothing to do with the fact that you’re not a Stark, not even a bastard who plays Stark until he finds out that he is truly heir to the Iron. Tron.

Now, if anyone could investigate to find out what happened to the ancestors of Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion.


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