The dire wolf is an extinct species of the genus Canis. It lived in the Americas and China during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs. The species was named in 1858, four years after the first specimen had been found. Its prey are known to have included horses, ground sloths, mastodons, bison, and camels.
About Dire wolf in brief
The dire wolf is an extinct species of the genus Canis. It lived in the Americas and China during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs. The species was named in 1858, four years after the first specimen had been found. The largest collection of its fossils has been obtained from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Its prey are known to have included horses, ground sloths, mastodons, bison, and camels. Dire wolves lived as recently as 9,500 years ago, according to dated remains. Its extinction occurred during the Quaternary extinction event along with most of the American megafauna of the time, including a number of other carnivores. Its reliance on megaherbivores has been proposed as the cause of its extinction, along with climate change and competition with other species, but the cause remains controversial. The dire wolf was about the same size as the largest modern gray wolves : the Yukon wolf and the northwestern wolf. Two subspecies are recognized: Canis dirus guildayi and Canis dirus dirus. It probably evolved from Armbruster’s wolf in North America. It is one of the most famous prehistoric carnivores in North American, along as its extinct competitor, the sabre-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis. Its teeth were larger with greater shearing ability, and its bite force at the canine tooth was the strongest of any known Canis species.
Its skull and dentition matched those of C. lupus, but its teeth were bigger and more powerful than those of Canis lupus. It weighed on average 60 kilograms and on average 68 kg. It was a pack hunter, and is thought to have been the largest of the Canis hypercarnivores today. The last dire wolf to be found alive was in the late 19th century. It died out in the early 20th century, but it is still thought to be the largest carnivore of its kind in the world. Its remains have been found across a broad range of habitats including the plains, grasslands, and some forested mountain areas of North America, and in the arid savannah of South America. Its fossils have rarely been found north of 42°N latitude; there have been only five unconfirmed reports above this latitude. The fossilized jawbone with cheek-teeth was obtained by the geologist Joseph Granville Norwood from an Evansville collector, Francis A. Linck. In 1908 the paleontologist John Campbell Merriam began retrieving numerous fossilized bone fragments of a large wolf. By 1912 he found a skeleton sufficiently complete to be able to formally recognize these and the previously found specimens under the name C. dirus. In 1915 Edward Troxell indicated that the oldest specimen of a species should be the oldest name ever applied to it, which was C.dirus C. dirus.
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This page is based on the article Dire wolf published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
