Because the rules of nomenclature stipulated that the name of a species should be the oldest name ever applied to it, Merriam therefore selected the name of Leidy's 1858 specimen, C. By 1912 he had found a skeleton sufficiently complete to be able to formally recognize these and the previously found specimens under the name C. In 1908 the paleontologist John Campbell Merriam began retrieving numerous fossilized bone fragments of a large wolf from the Rancho La Brea tar pits. As so little was found of these three specimens, Allen thought it best to leave each specimen listed under its provisional name until more material could be found to reveal their relationship. dirus (Leidy 1858) and Canis indianensis (Leidy 1869). In 1876 the zoologist Joel Asaph Allen discovered the remains of Canis mississippiensis (Allen 1876) and associated these with C. Display at the Page Museum of 404 dire wolf skulls found in the La Brea Tar Pits primaevus had previously been used by the British naturalist Brian Houghton Hodgson for the dhole. primaevus (Leidy 1854) was later renamed Canis indianensis (Leidy 1869) when Leidy found out that the name C. In 1857, while exploring the Niobrara River valley in Nebraska, Leidy found the vertebrae of an extinct Canis species that he reported the following year under the name C. Norwood's letters to Leidy are preserved along with the type specimen (the first of a species that has a written description) at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The paleontologist Joseph Leidy determined that the specimen represented an extinct species of wolf and reported it under the name of Canis primaevus. The fossilized jawbone with cheek teeth was obtained by the geologist Joseph Granville Norwood from an Evansville collector, Francis A. The first specimen of what would later become associated with Aenocyon dirus was found in mid-1854 in the bed of the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana. Dire wolves lived as recently as 9,500 years ago, according to dated remains.įrom the 1850s, the fossil remains of extinct large wolves were being found in the United States, and it was not immediately clear that these all belonged to one species. Its reliance on megaherbivores has been proposed as the cause of its extinction, along with climatic change and competition with other species, or a combination of those factors. Its extinction occurred during the Quaternary extinction event along with its main prey species. These characteristics are thought to be adaptations for preying on Late Pleistocene megaherbivores, and in North America, its prey is known to have included western horses, ground sloths, mastodons, ancient bison, and camels. lupus, but its teeth were larger with greater shearing ability, and its bite force at the canine tooth was stronger than any known Canis species. Its skull and dentition matched those of C. guildayi weighed on average 60 kilograms (132 lb) and A. The dire wolf was about the same size as the largest modern gray wolves ( Canis lupus): the Yukon wolf and the northwestern wolf. However, the 2020 discovery of dire wolf fossils in northeast China indicates that dire wolves had crossed Beringia when it existed. This range restriction is thought to be due to temperature, prey, or habitat limitations imposed by proximity to the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets that existed at the time. Dire wolf fossils have rarely been found north of 42°N latitude there have been only five unconfirmed reports above this latitude. The sites range in elevation from sea level to 2,255 meters (7,400 ft). The largest collection of its fossils has been obtained from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.ĭire wolf remains have been found across a broad range of habitats including the plains, grasslands, and some forested mountain areas of North America, the arid savanna of South America, and the steppes of eastern Asia. Two subspecies are recognized: Aenocyon dirus guildayi and Aenocyon dirus dirus. The species was named in 1858, four years after the first specimen had been found. The dire wolf lived in the Americas and eastern Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000–9,500 years ago). It is one of the most famous prehistoric carnivores in North America, along with its extinct competitor Smilodon. The dire wolf ( Aenocyon dirus / iː ˈ n ɒ s aɪ.
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