Not dinosaurs - just not a reptile kinda girl and any spark of interest was probably killed by the portrayal of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Other than Bruce, the Jaws shark, no animal has given me the willies as badly as those. I know that real raptors were lots smaller than those, but no one ever says they were not that clever do they? T-rex is all big and blustery scary, but a ravenous pack of pirhana can do just as much damage even though they are tiny. So size doesn't decrease effectiveness in predators. If anything it makes them quicker and more deadly.
Gotcha - no dinosaurs. Dead people - absolutely. Love me some bones. Skeletons of all kinds. Day of the Dead - abso-freakin-lutely. Huge nerdy fan of Lewis Leakey. I blame that one on Nat'l Geo too. Odd how much of what I dig as an adult was first encountered within the yellow bordered glossy pages of that mag.
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| Direwolf Canis Dirus |
There used to be a bar in Whitefish, MT called the Direwolf where I would go with my brother when I was visiting him. It felt very remote and rather like I imagine The Brick would be if there really were a Cicely, Alaska. I always liked going there because it felt the kind of place one could encounter Indiana Jones or a shaman or any number of other characters. A writer's heaven. Sadly much like it's namesake, the Direwolf is no more.
You can find lots of direwolves in the fantasy community. They are generally given the same bum's rush that real North American wolves were. They are villified, vampirized and generally considered the tools of evil. Funny how some myths persist in the human sub-conscious long after we have obliterated the thing we fear. I'm sure that direwolves lived a life not unlike that of their extant kin the grey wolf. Enter George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and now every HBO-watching mother's son knows about direwolves. YAY! So there is the possibility that if I mention one, I won't get a blank stare anymore. Thank you HBO!
Anyway...... I find myself today with a head full of direwolf thoughts and nowhere to go with them.
So what caused the demise of the direwolf?
ReplyDeleteMany direwolf skeletons were recovered from Labrea Tar pit in CA. According to the Museum of Natural History in San Diego
ReplyDelete"The Dire Wolf skeleton is more stout than that of the Gray Wolf, suggesting an adaptation for power rather than speed. Most of its prey species were rather sedentary herbivorous animals that were not able to run very fast to escape predation. Scientists suspect that once those relatively slow-moving prey animals became extinct, the Dire Wolf may not have been able to hunt and capture swifter prey in order to survive."
The disappearance of direwolves from the continent coincides with the appearance of humankind and it may be that humans out competed the direwolf for prey.
Short answer is that no one knows, but everyone has a theory.