Fossil Dogs, Vanished Lives
Occasionally on a moonlit night in San Diego's winter season, I recall a scene from the movie Dr. Zhivago . Eerie howling wolves circle the snowbound dacha . With a perverse paleontologist's imagination, I substitute American wolves for Boris Pasternack's Russian wolves. But not the ordinary gray wolf. I use Dire Wolves. Dire Wolves are perhaps the best known of all the fossil dogs from North America. Sturdier and larger than modern wolves, unfortunately they disappeared along with mammoths and mastodons by about 12,000 years ago, just about the time humans arrived in North America. Recent investigations of human habitation sites in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia indicate that domestic dogs were already living with humans by around 12,000 years ago, and that these dogs probably arrived in North America from Eurasia as did humans. Actually, the domestic dogs' arrival in North America was merely a homecoming, since all dogs in the world can trace their ancestry back to North America. For the last 37 million years some 140 species of dogs thrived and died here, giving rise at various times to emigrant dogs that populated the rest of the world. Today's wolf-like dogs (the Red and Gray Wolves, various jackals, the Bush Dog of Brazil, the African hunting dog, and the Asian dhole) all descend from | |
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