Miserable wolves: the first of their name, the last of their kind. Yes, you read that correctly. According to new research published today in The nature, the scientists finally managed to sequence the DNA of the wolves – and, to borrow a phrase from the 11 o’clock news, what they found might surprise you.
First of all, yes, terrible wolves are / were real. In contrast to the Game of Thrones“Other famous creatures, dragons, used to roam all over North America – more than 4,000 were excavated from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles alone. Howling wolves became extinct about 13,000 years ago and researchers have long believed this The dog is fading (translation: “scary dog”) were a sister species of the gray wolf. However, the paper published today says that it is not true at all. After analyzing the DNA of five fossilized remains, a team of 49 researchers found that the terrible wolves separated from other wolves more than 6 million years ago. They were, scientists discovered, so different from other canine species that – in stark contrast to the usual rampant incest in the show that made them famous – they could not even reproduce among themselves.
According to Angela Perri, an archaeologist at Durham University and the newspaper’s lead author, this is far more information than anyone has had before. The naughty wolves “have always been an iconic representation of the last ice age in America and now an icon of pop culture thanks to Game of Thrones,“But the information about them was limited to what could be determined by the size and shape of their bones and teeth. “With this first ancient DNA analysis of wolves,” she said in a statement, “we revealed that the history of wolves we thought we knew – especially a close relationship with gray wolves – is actually much more complicated than we think. “
What the researchers discovered was that instead of just a kind of gray wolf, terrible wolves actually had very distinct DNA. They are as similar to gray wolves as humans to chimpanzees. In other words, according to Perri’s co-author Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide, “all our data indicate that the terrible wolf is the last surviving member of an ancient offspring distinct from all living canines.”
This uniqueness could have been their downfall. Gray wolves and coyotes survived well into the late Pleistocene, and researchers believe it may have been the result of greater flexibility in the environment or diet (if all the troubled wolves ate, they too died). Or other animals may have succeeded because they were able to “hybridize with other canids”, such as dogs, gaining new immunities along the way. (Last year, a separate research team found that domestic dogs separated from wolves about 11,000 years ago and split into five distinct genetic lines, probably due to people raising them for certain traits.) , the reason you don’t have your own wolf has everything to do with adapting to the environment and has nothing to do with the fact that you’re not a Stark, or even a bastard who pretends to be a Stark until he finds out that it’s actually – hoops! – the heir to Iron Tron.
Now, if only someone could do some research to find out what happened to Drogon’s ancestors, Rhaegal and Viserion.
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