fossil record

We know from the fossil record that dire wolves were social creatures, but we’re too late to observe exactly how each generation of pups learned skills from the one before it.

As creatures that were created by modifying modern organisms, and who live in modern times, they are untethered from the evolutionary history embodied by the real dire wolves who now rest in the fossil record.

"Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record," said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.

"You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can learn exactly what the environment that it was living in was like. So tracks give us a whole different set of information that you can't get from the bone fossil record."

"In biological anthropology, we're always interested in finding new ways to extract behavior from the fossil record, and this is a great example," said Rebecca Ferrell, a program director at the National Science Foundation who helped fund this portion of the research.