Aeono–who?
You know: the dire wolf: Aenocyon dirus.
Why isn’t it Canis dirus?
I’m going with what she said about convergent evolution this month because:
- There aren’t that many online embeddable videos of any sort on dire wolves
- This year’s project uses alliteration to match Friday and Saturday posts to each month. Unfortunately, no month begins with “W,” and we must have wolves.
It isn’t technically correct to think of the dire wolf as a mastiff to the gray wolf’s Irish spaniel, but imagination is a wonderfully free kind of thing.
Each Saturday in April, let’s do a list of links to more information about dire wolves; hopefully a video, too; and then at least one video on wolves that might give some insight into that convergent Aenocyon.
Today, the main point is that gray wolves are walking around the countryside and dire wolves are not.
Here is just one hypothesis of why that might be:
That is very convincing and might be overall the case in the La Brea region, for all I know, but these extinctions happened all over the world (except Africa) and the scientific debate about their causes continues.
That gets very technical very quickly, so let’s just look up more information about dire wolves:
- Wikipedia page
- Some dire wolf facts
- More information on why the boffins changed this critter’s name
For lagniappe:
Featured image: Wikipedia, public domain.
Flight To Wonder 