Contents
Profile
Range: Quaternary (Pleistocene-Holocene, 2 MYA to 10,000 YA) from North America, Venezuela, and Peru
Size estimate: 2’ 9” at the shoulder, 150-240 lbs
Discovery: Joseph Leidy, 1858
Classification: mammalia, carnivora, caniformia, canidae
True to Life?
Since no one has ever seen a living dinosaur, and the missing pieces of the fossil record withhold important clues to their appearance, no artistic representation of a dinosaur ever gets it 100% right. On top of that, new discoveries can change our ideas of extinct creatures drastically. So, how close does this sculpture come to what we know of the original animal?
- Since the dire wolf skeleton almost exactly matches that of the modern timber wolf, it would be easy to assume that dire wolves just looked like big timber wolves. A recent study of dire wolf genetics puts a different spin on that assumption without overturning it entirely. It found that dire wolves belong to a lineage which split from the line leading to timber wolves 6 million years ago. The modern Andean fox belongs to the same lineage. Therefore, though we know some things about how dire wolves appeared in life with total exactness, like tooth shape or general build, our ideas about more genetically variable characteristics like fur color or ear shape have entered a state of flux. Dire wolves could still appear extremely wolf-like, but art depicting radically different models aren’t necessarily wrong either. Our reconstruction takes the morphologically conservative route, portraying a large wolf.
- That said, to reflect the findings of the genetics study, we opted to give our wolves a color scheme inspired by the Andean fox.
- How much bigger would the dire wolf have grown compared to the timber wolf? A large timber wolf would tip the scales against a below-average dire wolf. A big dire wolf would still look noticeably larger than even an unusually large timber wolf.
- Behind the scenes: due to the close resemblance between the two species, we used timber wolf taxidermy forms as a basis for these sculptures (the second one is currently located in the lobby, awaiting installation). The artist, Kirk Larsen, beefed them up quite a bit, but even so, these sculptures necessarily skew on the small end for dire wolves.
- Behind the scenes: the current sculptures replace a pair which took coyote taxidermy forms as their basis! They looked like puppies! Cute as they were, they didn’t wear well in the weather, in part because of their size.