Dire wolves were some of the largest and most significant predators of Ice Age North America between 250,000 and 13,000 years ago, but not much is known about the details
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IMAGE: Two gray wolves (lower left) confront a pack of dire wolves over a bison carcass in Southwestern North America 15,000 years ago. view more
Credit: Art by Mauricio Anton
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.
The study, which puts to bed a mystery that biologists have pondered for more than 100 years, was led by researchers from UCLA, along with colleagues from Durham University in the U.K., Australia s Adelaide University and Germany s Ludwig Maximilian University.
Extinct dire wolves split off from other wolves nearly six million years ago and were only a distant relative of today s wolves, according to new research published in Nature.