Knowing the cruel prince wouldn’t let his attacker off easily, Arya sent Nymeria away to protect her. While Ned believed it would be more merciful to kill them, Jon convinced him that the Stark kids were meant to raise these pups since direwolves are the symbol of their house.īut the only ones still alive are Ghost and Arya’s direwolf Nymeria.Īrya set her direwolf free during the first season after Nymeria jumped in to defend her against Prince Joffrey Baratheon. Gray wolves, also found in the pits, still exist today.The direwolves were introduced in the first episode of the series, when Lord Ned Stark and his children stumbled upon a family of orphaned pups. More than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the study notes, but scientists don't know much about the reasons why they disappeared. Because the wolves could not interbreed with other species, the researchers postulate some of the genetic traits that kept those species alive were not handed over to the ancient canines. The study was the first time ancient DNA has been taken from dire wolves and it suggested that the species evolved solely in North America for millions of years, not migrating as other species do between North America and Eurasia. The team sequenced the ancient DNA of five dire wolf sub-fossils from Wyoming, Idaho, Ohio, and Tennessee, dating back to over 50,000 years ago. The research was led by Durham University in the UK, with help from scientists at the University of Oxford, Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany, the University of Adelaide and UCLA. 'All our data point to the dire wolf being the last surviving member of an ancient lineage distinct from all living canines.'

'While ancient humans and Neanderthals appear to have interbred, as do modern gray wolves and coyotes, our genetic data provided no evidence that dire wolves interbred with any living canine species,' Mitchell said. In a scene from HBO's Game of Thrones, Tormund Giantsbane and Jon Snow's dire wolf, Ghost, watch Jon ride away. According to the study, dire wolves split off from these wolves lineages nearly 6 million years ago and were only a distant relative of today's wolves. Gray wolves can and do interbreed with other similar animals, including African wolves, dogs, coyotes and jackals, but dire wolves were too genetically different to mate with the other groups.

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