The fossilized jaw of a beast that once roamed the bluffs along the South Saskatchewan River, competing with saber-toothed cats (Smilodon) in hunting horses, bison, camels, and mammoths was lurking in the basement collection of a museum in Canada.
Ashley R. Reynolds, a researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum's Department of Natural History in Toronto, decided to reexamine some previous discoveries with the benefit of new knowledge gained since the discovery.
Canadian Dire Wolf Fossil Formally Identified
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
During the pandemic lockdown, this practice gained renewed popularity in collections around the world, leading to many interesting discoveries, including the work Reynolds published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, as per Phys.org.
Reynolds and colleagues had previously discovered the first evidence of a Canadian saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) in the museum collection.
Reynolds analyzed more fossil material from the same excavation site in the current study, "Dire wolf (Canis dirus) from the late Pleistocene of southern Canada (Medicine Hat, Alberta)," to formally identify a dire wolf from a fossilized jaw bone in the collection.
Identified the fossil, discovered in 1969, as a dire wolf. Based on its large size, CS. Churcher (an author in the current paper) reported it to the Geological Survey of Canada in an unpublished report in 1970.
To confirm the initial identification, it has never been illustrated or described in detail.
Dire wolves are the gray wolf's larger, extinct canid cousin, with more muscular builds and stronger jaws.
Three dire wolf species were found from North and South America to Eastern China.
Because their territory ranges frequently overlapped with other large predators, most notably saber-toothed cats three times their size, they must have been fierce competitors.
It is unusual that the jaw went unstudied for so long given that the specimen would be the first and only dire wolf discovered in Canada, as well as the species' northernmost known occurrence by 500 km.
It's possible that the initial observations lacked confidence for more formal identification because it was such an outlier.
There is some difficulty distinguishing between a gray wolf and a dire wolf from a poorly preserved fossil because the two are so morphologically similar, despite estimates that the two are separated by more than 5.5 million years.
The identification would have been simple if there had been a complete fossil jaw in good condition, as the size and distinct patterns on teeth can clearly separate the two.
The 1969 fossil was in poor condition, fractured in several places, and missing the more obvious clues on tooth surfaces because some teeth were missing, and the teeth that were preserved with the jaw either preserved poorly or were naturally worn down by an elderly wolf.
Although dire wolves are typically larger than grey wolves, this individual was within the normal size ranges of both species, as per Interesting Engineering.
As a result, the researchers took a different approach. The scientists assessed the shape of the fossil by taking measurements along its outline with a computer tool.
They compared it to the values they were familiar with from dire and grey wolves.
This is the northernmost confirmed specimen of the dire wolf ever discovered. This is due to the fact that a large ice sheet covered most of what is now Canada back then.
It's difficult to imagine an Ice Age bestiary on the rolling, grassy plains around the South Saskatchewan River, where the dire wolf was discovered.
Still, the ice recedes from time to time, allowing habitat to reopen from Yukon to central and southeast Alberta.
