Honor to be the Light in the Darkness -- Guys.The dire wolf. It's real. And Winter is Coming.

May the light of the seven shine upon you, I'm Trace, thanks for tuning in to DNews!

If you're not familiar, in Game of Thrones, the family symbol of many of the main characters

who've died thus far in the series -- spoiler -- is a direwolf; a massive, intelligent species

wolf common in the wildlands north of the Wall. But, and this is just frickin' amazing…

The direwolf isn't entirely fictional! As late as 12,000 years ago, right here in the

good old Americas, there were dire wolves. Aaaaaand they might be coming back.

Okay, so the direwolf and the dire wolf are two different things. The one word direwolf

is fictional, and two word dire wolf or canis dirus was very real! In the first season of

the TV show, direwolf pups are played by Northern Inuit Dogs, which are bred to look like wolves.

In the later seasons the wolves were played by actual wolves, because HBO does not do

half measures. This is about the best we can do today, because actual dire wolves are extinct.

The real life Canis dirus lived between 300,000 and 12,000 years ago, which, as it happens,

was the last time perpetual winter happened for real. Dire wolves evolved towards the

end of the Pleistocene epoch, the last great ice age, when huge glaciers covered up to

30% of the Earth’s surface. At their peak, the ice sheets extended as far south as what

is now Kentucky and were almost 4 kilometers thick. This was the age of megafauna like

mammoths, giant condors, giant beavers, and giants sloths. Pretty much everything had

the word giant in its name. For warm blooded animals, being larger meant retaining heat

better, which was an advantage during an ice age. So combine giant prey with colder conditions

and you get a Red Wedding made in heaven for bigger predators like dire wolves.

Dire wolves weren’t quite as huge as George “valar morghulis” Martin makes them out

to be**. An average dire wolf was about 80 cm tall, the same height of modern gray wolves,

but they were 25% heavier, weighing up to 67 kilograms. Their skulls were broader and

had a large crest down the midline that was a good anchor point for their strong jaw muscles.

Because of that their bite is estimated to be 29% stronger than a gray wolf’s, which

already has the largest bite pressure of any living canid.

Dire wolves and gray wolves coexisted for about 100,000 years, but the end of the pleistocene

was marked with a period of extinction that wiped out three quarters of the large ice

age animals. No one’s really sure why, it may have been due to climate change or humans

getting really good at hunting or both, but suddenly all those giant animals died out.

The dire wolves went the way of the wooly mammoth and sabre-toothed cat and the Starks,

while their smaller, quicker, bigger-brained cousins, the gray wolves, survived.

So, you can’t have a dire wolf as a pet because their genetic lineage hit a dead end

and most of what we know about them comes from the skeletons we’ve found in the La

Brea tar pits, where there were oodles of dire poodles. But one dog breeder is aiming

to revive them, or at least the fantasy version of them. The Dire Wolf Project has been breeding

larger, long-lived dire wolf-alikes since 1988. After spending 20 years Never Resting,

and breeding Alaskan Malamutes, German Shepherds, Great Pyrenees, Anatolian Shepherd, and English

Mastiff together -- they created what they called the American Alsatian a 59kg shaggy

dog. Still 8 kilos lighter than a true canis dirus, but still Growing Strong.

Dogs have been with humanity waaay longer than we thought, but who actually domesticated

them? Did we do it? Or did dogs domesticate themselves? -- Check out DNews Plus for a

whole series on the domestication of animals big and small here.