Dire Wolf Bred?

[Bakis]

D&D was nothing compared to LOTR. A single goblin the easiest humanoid monster wiped our party of 5 :/
Thankfully I had 2 decades to mend from that tragic and scaring midday after school :~~

[Techno-Druid]

Dire wolves were roughly the size of modern day gray wolves.

In addition, a species that inhabited areas including mid-range California during a relatively warm period wouldn't have had much use for excess amounts of hair.. The dog pictured is more hairy than modern-day wolves with winter coats.

Dire Wolves lived in the later half of the Pleistocene and could range anywhere from Bolivia to Alberta and most likely if not certainly existed in multiple subspecies in a pattern similar to modern gray wolves. While they were the size of modern gray wolves, they had a larger and more pit-bull-like face with shorter legs. It's also believed they were behaviorally different, taking care of the injured in a manner African Wild Dogs do.

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And the OP wants to breed them for his RPG dreams.

He would totally wipe to a random encounter with a pack of them.

Yep, going to breed some dire bears!

[Halyon]

I'm pretty sure the goal is not to get an actual savage wolf out of the project.

Anyway its pretty fun to see how some people just instantly drop the "that looks photoshopped" bomb. Nothing to back up their statement at all. Just throwing some discredibility out there for no apparent reason :P

I won't say it's photoshopped, but the angle is manipulated to make it look a lot bigger than it actually is.

[Deleted]

I won't say it's photoshopped, but the angle is manipulated to make it look a lot bigger than it actually is.

And the couch and the guy are tiny in reality.

[Halyon]

And the couch and the guy are tiny in reality.

No. When the couch is large in the forefront, were the dog is, and tiny in the back, were the person sits, ofc the dog will look fucking humongous. They did this with that there pitbull...mutation (the dog is huge for the breed and age, but made to look a lot bigger than it would in reality be) and that there great dane that would be the biggest in the world.

That's not photosh00ping it, it's just manipulating the angle to exaggerate something. You know, like obnoxious use of wide-angle lens in certain movies.

[Tierbook]

Pretty sure the largest dog was Zeus before he died


Unless we go by weight



Zeus died at 5 years 8 months, age expectancy for Danes is 6-8, Zorba was a mastiff and they live on average 7 years, no word on when he died but he was measured at age 8

[Bats]

I'm sorry, but what exactly makes people think the dog in the picture is "HUGE"? I can't see anything in there to compare it with. It's obviously not a chihuahua, but I just can't tell how big it is exactly.

[Techno-Druid]

I'm sorry, but what exactly makes people think the dog in the picture is "HUGE"? I can't see anything in there to compare it with. It's obviously not a chihuahua, but I just can't tell how big it is exactly.

Yeah, I changed pictures midway through the thread

[Wildtree]

regarding the size.... that should give a little idea.

[derpkitteh]

regarding the size.... that should give a little idea.

they're smaller than my dog, and he's not even super huge.

leonbergers would dwarf these things.

[Celista]

regarding the size.... that should give a little idea.

They look like long haired German Shepherds :/ They should just give up on the whole dire wolf business, the whole thing seems silly.

[Techno-Druid]

They look like long haired German Shepherds :/ They should just give up on the whole dire wolf business, the whole thing seems silly.

Part of their foundation stock was German shepherd, as well as Anatolian shepherd, Great Pyrenees and malamute. And besides form the extra hair, they're doing the dire wolf image pretty accurate, larger heads, shorter legs are all traits of the dire wolf.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Selective breeding to make a dog look like a dire wolf? I prefer my dogs all natural organic, none of this GMO crap.

[Techno-Druid]

I feel like dire wolves would not have been German shepherds with slightly longer hair. I think it's rather silly and perhaps even dishonest for people to draw such comparisons between extinct species and extant ones. The idea of extinct species being brought back seems to excite people quite a bit, but that's not what any of this is.

They're breeding the dogs to have an anatomy and health identical to the extinct dire wolf, but with the boldness and loyalty of any good dog. These aren't just long haired German shepherds (which is actually interesting considering how wolves took part in the creation of the German shepherd), these have ancestry form Anatolian shepherds and malamutes.









Not to mention the selective breeding for health and personality. Dire wolves didn't look exactly like they did in real life compared to Game of Thrones.

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Selective breeding to make a dog look like a dire wolf? I prefer my dogs all natural organic, none of this GMO crap.

Are domestic dogs are selectively bred. It's not like they're inserting random genes into these dogs, the person who started this project was a very talented breeder who bred many animals and started this project as a mere young child.

[Celista]

What I'm getting out of this is these aren't dire wolves, just big dogs.

Not even that big, to be honest.

[Techno-Druid]

What I'm getting out of this is these aren't dire wolves, just big dogs.

Yes, they're not trying to recreate a dire wolf, just makes a dog that closely resembles one in the anatomical sense.

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Not even that big, to be honest.

Dire wolves were only 25% larger than modern day gray wolves and were much more dog-like compared to gray wolves.

[Celista]

Dire wolves were only 25% larger than modern day gray wolves and were much more dog-like compared to gray wolves.

The dire wolf became extinct 10,000 years ago. How do you know what dire wolf behavior is like, beyond what can be inferred from fossil findings?

[Techno-Druid]

What I'm getting out of this is these aren't dire wolves, just big dogs.

"For these reasons, the Dire Wolf Project, created by the National American Alsatian Breeder's Association (NAABA), does not aim to breed back the Dire Wolf genealogically and morphologically. This is an obvious impossibility and truthfully undesired. The only recourse is to breed back the bone and body structure by exactly matching the Dire Wolf skeletons through selective breeding. The outward appearance of a bred back Dire Wolf can only be an educated guess, just as scientists pose theories of coat type and temperament based on skeletal remains. In addition, the NAABA does not wish to create a ferocious predator and release such an animal into the wild. The other option, then, is to create a domesticated animal that can thrive peacefully in our current lifestyle. This limits such a program to using domesticated dog breeds that, when combined through selective breeding, have the correct genetic make-up to match the physical characteristics we know existed in the Dire Wolf."

Also, to mention that there are actually projects trying to breed back extinct animals (which have been hunted by humans and can't be cloned).







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The dire wolf became extinct 10,000 years ago. How do you know what dire wolf behavior is like, beyond what can be inferred from fossil findings?

Again! They're not trying to re-breed the dire wolf, just create a dog breed that resembles one.

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I pretty much hate when people deliberately oversell this type of thing. It's not a dire wolf. It will never be a dire wolf. It's just another breed of dog of no particular importance and this dire wolf stuff is just meant to cash in on whatever excitement people feel when they think about prehistoric species or the idea of bringing them back.

This project was started by a young child in the 80s? I don't think she necessarily wanted to get profit and even though it never will be a dire wolf, why stop now? You already bred the dog, you might as well keep selectively breeding for more healthy traits and a more dire wolf like skeletal system. The only reason why people even strayed to pay the slightest amount of attention to this project was when GoT came out on TV. Without Fire and Ice, most people probably wouldn't know what a dire wolf was.