Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but then Colossal Biosciences Company threw dire wolves at us. Pause.
Initially, I intended to discuss the penultimate S1
Daredevil episode, which had Bullseye coming back, and Murdock (Daredevil)
taking a bullet for Fisk (Kingpin) because of reasons? Apparently? Does anyone
care about those two anymore anyhow? Dire wolves are more interesting than MCU,
these days.
…Of course, these days, at least some news outlets
discuss with an authentic feeling, who makes a better jam and/or spread – king
Charles III of Great Britain or Megan Markle, his younger daughter-in-law.
Seriously, and compared to this sort of news, MCU’s D: BA show is cutting-edge
political drama or something along those lines. Nevertheless, what about the
dire wolves?
…I am a sceptic when it came to CB’s claims. See,
while the RL dire wolf (let us leave Westeros out of this, the topic is already
quite confusing), is a true canine, (as opposed to a bear-dog, a bear, or any
other kind of mammal carnivore), it also belonged to a completely different
genus than the modern wolves do. However, so what?
See, even CB admits (sort of) that their dire wolves
– Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi – are not exactly purebred dire wolves, more
like grey wolf/dire wolf hybrids. Eh? The problem with that statement that in
nature hybrids occur only between animals that share the same genus, albeit
belonging to different species. Pause.
Let us try again. We are talking only about mammals
here; in other animal groups, such as birds (say, songbirds), or amphibians
(such as the tailed salamanders) the hybrid situation might be quite different,
but along the mammals? Either it works or it does not.
See for yourselves. On one hand, we have horses and
donkeys, whose hybrids are sterile and can’t really make a new species; big
cats, whose hybrids aren’t sterile but can’t survive in the wild due to
health-related reasons; and the two species of the gnu antelope, whose hybrid
offspring also aren’t sterile but have plenty of health defects that they die
quickly enough. Pause.
On other hand, we have the beluga and the narwhale
whales, for example, or the better-known polar and grizzly brown bears, whose hybrid
offspring are viable and are increasing in numbers. The wolf branch of the wild
dog family, incidentally, is in this boat too, as the various coyote/grey
wolf/domestic dog hybrids of eastern North America are growing more numerous
and are establishing their own independent populations…
That said, those wild dogs are all in the Canis
genus, while the extinct dire wolf is not, not anymore, at least not at the
moment. In addition, if you look at the related animals that belong to
different genera, they do not form hybrids – just look at rhinos or elephants,
for example. African and Asian elephants do not hybridize, not even in captivity,
unlike the big cats, and the black and white rhinos of Africa do not hybridize –
unlike the feral domestic dogs and the Ethiopian wolf. The latter is a
separate, albeit related, species to the grey wolf of the northern hemisphere –
the term ‘wolf’ covers almost two dozen animal species, living and extinct,
most of whom are related to each other (i.e. they’re canines), but some are not…
Where were we? Right, the DNA of the dire wolf isn’t
in as a good a condition as that of the woolly mammoth is – what’s left of the dire
wolf are mainly fossilized bones, teeth, and the like. Extracting DNA from
them, even if the dire wolf was in the same genus as the grey wolf, doesn’t
guarantee success; the fact that the surrogate mothers were domestic dogs, aka
a third canine species, separate from the other two (I’m going with this theory),
only complicated the situation: how did their pregnancies go? How did the
births go? Did the mothers survive or not? However, no, all we get are
sterilized reports of a success, and automatic reactions to those reports.
Neither is a reliable source of information and so far no one outside of CB has
much to go on. Still…
Remember Ms. Nicole from my last week’s entry? Or
rant, whatever. As it was said, she was hired by CB, or something similar to
make six videos about mass extinctions; so far, two of them were aired, but we
talked about this; the point is that one would expect her to jump onto the dire
wolf promotion bandwagon, because CB are her employers or something, but no. She
is keeping mum about them instead and seems to have outright distanced herself
from the CB. Does she know something about this that we do not? Maybe, maybe
not, but I, for one, am sceptical of just what CB’s latest wolf pups are. Real
life does suck, but sometimes it is less sucky and more complex and complicated
instead…
This is it for now. See you all soon!
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