Dire wolf information8/11/2023 ![]() The process was fairly straightforward: When an herbivore would get stuck in the tar, hungry meat-eaters would come running, only to suffer an identical fate. That’s because, for several millennia, these pits functioned as a predator trap. In total, around 90 percent of La Brea’s mammalian fossils belonged to carnivores of some kind. (Just so we're clear, those huge felines were not actually tigers.) After dire wolves, saber-toothed cats are the second most commonly-found mammal at the La Brea tar pits, where thousands of their bones have been discovered. Dire Wolves Coexisted with Saber-Toothed Cats.įew prehistoric creatures are more iconic than the magnificent beast known scientifically as Smilodon fatalis. How did so many end up dying in the same place? Skip ahead to our next item.ĥ. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg-so far, the pits themselves have yielded more 200,000 individual dire wolf specimens. An awesome display case inside the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits houses nearly 400 Canis dirus skulls. Name: tarpits7 with arrow.jpg Views: 0 Size: 86.1 KB ID: 359896"] įorget Winterfell: If you want to see some dire wolves, head to southern California. Pyry Matikainen, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.5 SoCal’s La Brea Tar Pits are a Dire Wolf Gold Mine. But bison, mastodons, ancient camels, and giant ground sloths were also available, if the wolves felt like shaking things up a bit.Ĥ. These hoofed mammals formed the bulk of a dire wolf’s diet, as revealed by tooth analyses. Therrien estimates that even the most forceful dire wolf bite was only 69 percent as strong as those inflicted by the American lion ( Panthera atrox), which disappeared 11,000 years ago. Yet, in his view, the jaws of another long-extinct carnivore would have made both of them look relatively toothless. Paleontologist François Therrien calculated that dire wolves could chomp down with 129 percent of the force available to their 21st-century cousins. dirus probably wasn't super-speedy, as evidenced by its proportionately shorter legs. Dire wolf bones were broader overall and connected to large, enviable muscles. dirus exceeded its modern cousin ( Canis lupus) in weight by roughly 25 percent, which means members of the extinct species weighed somewhere between 125 and 175 pounds. Despite being about the same length as the gray wolf, C. Īs the cliché goes, dire wolves weren’t fat-just big-boned. They Were More Muscular than Today’s Grey Wolves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |