The iconic, prehistoric dire wolf, which prowled through Los Angeles and elsewhere in the Americas over 11 millennia ago, was a distinct species from the slightly smaller gray wolf, an international team of scientists reports today in the journal Nature. Significantly, they found no evidence for the flow of genes between dire wolves and either North American gray wolves or coyotes. “We have found the dire wolf is not closely related to the gray wolf. The dire wolf was a ‘lone wolf’ when it came to breedingInterbreeding is quite common among wolf lineages when their geographical ranges overlap. “This result is consistent with the hypothesis that dire wolves originated in the Americas.”Another hypothesis about the dire wolf — one untested in the current study — concerns its extinction.

Source: Ethiopian News January 13, 2021 16:07 UTC