Beth Shapiro

When we published a paper before I joined Colossal many years ago that was about dire wolf evolution, we had a paleo artist reconstruct what dire wolves looked like, and they made them red or reddy brown.

And that's because so many other animals seem to be reddy brown, like mammoths or Neanderthals seem to have had red hair.

And so we thought, sure, why not?

We didn't know because we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we could use to see what color their coats were.

But both of these two animals that we had higher coverage DNA from had gene variants in genes that are associated with pigmentation, how our coats, the hair color and eye color and things like that, that suggested they had light colored coats.

And so we thought that's cool.

We'll have that as one of our key dire wolf traits that we're bringing back.

It's possible, yeah.

And I'm sure there were different colors.

But it's interesting to me that two animals that lived so far apart from each other in time and geography would both have this light color coat.

So maybe it wasn't that every dire wolf had a light coat, but it must have been a predominant color in the population.

It's possible.

Both of these animals were from northern part of their range where it would have been colder.

They did live through previous interglacial periods.

125,000 years ago, it was as warm as it is today or even warmer with predicted to be no ice at the poles.

And also we know dire wolves were really common around the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.

We haven't been able to get any DNA out of anything from La Brea.

That would be an amazing discovery.

Don't know if it destroys it or if it gets into the bone in a way that we can't get the DNA out.

So somehow inhibiting the recovery of the DNA.