Science explains why real-life dire wolves went extinct

The direwolves on Game of Thrones are based on real-life dire wolves of North America, which haven’t been around for thousands of years. Why?

On Game of Thrones, the direwolves given to each of the Stark children sort of became mascots for the show, from Grey Wind to Nymeria to Jon Snow’s own direwolf Ghost. Hulking beasts several times the size of ordinary wolves, they were as fierce as they were protective, capable of ripping you limb from limb or settling down for a good pet as the situation called for.

Direwolves were not real; George R.R. Martin made them up. However, he did base the concept for outsized wolves on dire wolves, a real animal that died out around 9,500 years ago. If you like, you can even go see the fossilized remains of dire wolves at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where scientists have excavated over 4,000 specimens.

According to a new study of ancient dire wolf DNA published in the journal Nature, dire wolves evolved exclusively in North America for millions of years, rather than migrating between North America and Eurasia like other species did; that might explain why so many were packed into the La Brea Tar Pits.

But why did this species did out in the first place? According to the researchers, it’s because they became genetically distinct from other species to point where they couldn’t pass on their genes. “Despite anatomical similarities between gray wolves and dire wolves — suggesting that they could perhaps be related in the same way as modern humans and Neanderthals — our genetic results show these two species of wolf are much more like distant cousins, like humans and chimpanzees,” said study co-lead author Kieren Mitchell, from the University of Adelaide in Australia.

"While ancient humans and Neanderthals appear to have interbred, as do modern gray wolves and coyotes, our genetic data provided no evidence that dire wolves interbred with any living canine species. All our data point to the dire wolf being the last surviving member of an ancient lineage distinct from all living canines."

It looks like dire wolves split off from other kinds of canines around 6 million years ago, and the gap never closed.

We don’t know everything, of course, like why there were so few dire wolves around that they couldn’t just interbreed amongst themselves and carry on the species, but it’s a nice lesson in the importance of biodiversity. And if you wanna imagine what these beasts could do in their prime, there’s always Game of Thrones.

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h/t CNET