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Dire wolves were real! Oh you didn’t know this? You know nothing, Jon Snow.
Scientists have analyzed the DNA of dire wolves and say that they deserve a species category all of their own. They are not actually close cousins of the gray wolves, as previously thought.
“Even though they look like wolves, dire wolves actually have nothing to do with wolves,” says lead researcher Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at Durham University.
In fact, the dire wolf is now thought to have been 20% bigger than a modern day wolf and actually resemble a large coyote instead. Archeologists want them removed from the Canis family of dog-like animals and put into their own classification called the Aenocyon dirus.
Scientists suspect that dire wolves were killed off by climate change along with their other ice age buddies.
