While there isn’t a whole lot of reliable information online about Aenocyon dirus, the dire wolf is cool — cool enough for us to enjoy an interesting but not altogether reliable video about it:
Enjoy, but don’t accept the quoted facts as truth.
That’s a good point, made in several scientific papers, about tooth breakage at La Brea possibly being a sign of increased competition among carnivores there.
But some statements are not accurate. For instance, dogs and wolves are not hypercarnivores — they are omnivores, according to all research I’ve done for the cat books.
Cats are hypercarnivores, which is why Fluffy needs its own food and cannot live on Fido’s.
Dire wolves? I think the experts know too little about them to really be sure about their diet.
[Layperson speculation] In areas where there were both dire wolves and gray wolves, dire wolves might be hypercarnivorous in order to coexist with their omnivorous cousins.
But that would bring them into competition with just SO many cats…
[/Layperson speculation]
Size is another popular area for speculation.
Unfortunately, as this paper shows (mild jargon alert), dire wolf fossils are widespread but uncommon, outside La Brea (where everything is a tarry jumble).
Old Aenocyon’s size apparently varied quite a bit, from what I’ve read, and in some cases it was probably smaller than a timberwolf.
Could you rescue a timberwolf this way? “Whew,” indeed! The wolf ran away.
Sigh. It’s hard for even apex predators to compete against us.
But back in the day, and given the convergence between Aenocyon and Canis lupus, some interactions like this — where the bear is going for competitive exclusion by killing off the young — probably happened.
Getting back to the cats, some experts suggest that dire wolves and Smilodon, while not above scavenging at La Brea, did not compete very much.
My hunch is that they took different paths for the same reason that canids and felids do today.
One likes to play and the other is all business…;)
Featured image: Wikipedia, public domain.
Flight To Wonder 