George R.R. Martin helped with a scientific paper about dire wolves

George R.R. Martin is known for two things: writing the Song of Ice and Fire series (which HBO adapted as Game of Thrones) and for taking forever to finish the Song of Ice and Fire series; fans have been waiting for the sixth volume, The Winds of Winter, for 14 years.

For this reason, some fans get a little testy whenever Martin does anything other than write new pages of Winds. That means they're testy often, because Martin is a guy with a diverse set of interests. Just the other week, it was revealed that he was involved with a company called Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring back extinct species. Here Martin is holding the first dire wolf to be born in millennia:

I'm sorry, but I'd also probably take a break from writing my fantasy epic to cuddle an extinct species. And of course, dire wolves are especially significant for Martin, since the huge wolves play a role in his Song of Ice and Fire series, where each of the Stark children adopt one.

There's been debate about whether these new dire wolves are really dire wolves as they existed thousands of years ago, or if Colossal Biosciences just edited a few of the genes in modern-day gray wolves so they look and act how we think ancient dire wolves looked and acted. Is there a meaningful different between those things? I'll leave that for the philosophers and scientists to debate.

Martin may be qualified to weigh in on that debate, because he's listed as a coauthor on a paper called, "On the ancestry and evolution of the extinct dire wolf." Basically, the paper tries to figure out how much of the DNA of the ancient dire wolf can be found in modern species. You're free to read the whole thing if you're interested.

In the Author Contributions section, Martin is listed as having helped with "review and editing." In other words, he didn't actually contribute to the main bulk of the research and writing for the paper; without the scientific credentials, I don't know how he could have. Maybe the main authors just thought it would be cool to have the Game of Thrones guy listed as a coauthor, I dunno. In any case, I doubt this seriously impacted Martin's time spent working on The Winds of Winter.

Although this isn't the first time Martin has done something like this. Earlier this year, his name appeared on a physics paper inspired by the Wild Cards series of superhero stories, which he edits. Maybe he's carving out a second career as a scientific researcher...but probably not.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.