Miocene (Pt 17): A Diversity of Dogs

Eucyon

As North America dried out in the Late Miocene, and slowly transitioned towards the deserts and open grasslands that became dominant across the central parts of the continent, it wasn't just the herbivores that were forced to adapt. Carnivores may not have been affected so directly, but, if their food source was changing, they had to do so too.

There were two particularly significant changes among the North American mammalian carnivores that took place around this time. One was the extinction of the bear-dogs, a group with a long history on the continent that was, by this time, typified by relatively large animals that would have looked more like bears than dogs (although they were neither). Over in Europe and Asia, the bear-dogs survived for rather longer, although even there they struggled...  but in North America, the changes were too extreme for them to cope with, and they died out as the Late Miocene dawned.

Pliocene (Pt 9): Coyotes, Cats, and Spectacled Bears

A modern spectacled bear

When it comes to the extinct mammalian predators of North America, few are more famous than the sabretooth cat Smilodon, with the dire wolf likely coming a close second. But both of these animals lived during the Ice Ages, and, of course, with all those tasty horses, deer, and so forth wandering the steppe-lands of Pliocene North America, there were plenty of carnivores there before the Ice Ages began. Indeed, scary though Smilodon undoubtedly was, unless you're the kind of person that enjoys wrestling hungry tigers in the modern world, many of these others were probably quite dangerous enough.

But not, it has to be said, all of them - at least, from a human perspective. There were, as you might expect, many small carnivores in North America at the time, including badgers, weasels, skunks, raccoons and early wolverines and otters. While we can't know the details of their coat colours, it's quite likely that many of these creatures would have looked not too different from their modern relatives and possibly would have been hard to tell apart from them on casual inspection.

Dire Wolves and Direr Dogs

Reconstruction of a dire wolf

[For more on dire wolves specifically, see: Dire Wolf Redux]

We are all familiar with the idea that, for much of the Age of Mammals, there have been large, scary cats with enormous teeth. They died out relatively recently, and as a result, we know a fair bit about them, and they remain one of the most popular prehistoric mammals with the general public - although mammoths do pretty well, too.

But, while the sabre-tooth cats stalked the world, what were the dogs like?

Perhaps the best known prehistoric dog is the dire wolf (Canis dirus). Do a google image search for "dire wolf" and you'll find far more images than you will searching for "sabre tooth", let alone something more specific like "Smilodon". But a look through those images gives you some idea why, and it doesn't have much to do with real-world fossils. The term "dire wolf" has been co-opted by fantasy fiction and games, and many of the pictures show the animals as they appear in Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, or Game of Thrones. They are generally portrayed as immense wolves, at least the size of a small horse, and sometimes with sabre teeth of their own, or bizarre spikes on their bodies.