UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The world was mesmerized by Colossal Biosciences’ recent announcement that they had cloned dire wolf pups, a species of canine that’s been extinct for more than 10,000 years. While experts have debated the “de-extinction” of these wolves, which are far more genetically similar to living grey wolf than to the original dire wolf, one thing is certainly true: An undergraduate student at Penn State recently catalogued a jawbone from one of Pennsylvania’s few dire wolf fossils. Aspiring paleontologist Ethan Merckx, a senior majoring in geobiology in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS), spoke about this recent discovery in the Q&A below.
Q: How did you find the dire wolf jawbone in the vertebrate collection?
Merckx: My classmates and I are part of a seminar class on vertebrate paleontology led by the Chris Widga, director of the EMS Museum and Art Gallery. As part of a semester-long project, we have been sorting through Pleistocene — commonly known as the Ice Age — fossil specimens belonging to a fissure fill, a crack in the Earth’s surface filled with surface matter over time, called Hollidaysburg Fissure, located in Blair County. A group led by Shirley Fonda, who earned her doctorate in geology from Penn State in 1976, first started collecting fossils from the Hollidaysburg Fissure in 1986. Fonda donated the collection to the EMS museum, and our objective for this semester is to compile the specimens into a digital format and rehouse them in a more protective environment. We are also working to synthesize our knowledge and publish data about the site.
As for how I found the jawbone, I stumbled upon the bone while working through one of the many boxes of vertebrate specimens we have been digitizing in class. I had the privilege of entering the bone into our data sheet and rehousing it.
Q: When did you realize what it was?
Merckx: Fortunately, many of the specimens were already identified by Shirley Fonda during her survey of Hollidaysburg Fissure, and the jaw was no exception. However, even if there was no previous ID, the jaw preserves enough to tell us it belongs to a dire wolf. The jaw itself is a partial left mandible that preserves a very large lower M1 molar, or slicing carnassial tooth. This tooth is used in canids — animals that belong to what’s known as the dog family — to slice and process meat. It’s highly pronounced in dire wolves, more so than in grey wolves.
This next observation is an inference on my part, but the tooth itself also exhibits a high amount of fracturing and wear. Dire wolves found in many late Pleistocene sites show these patterns on their molars, indicating that they partook in osteophagy, or bone-eating, fairly often. We don’t have enough data to determine if that is what truly caused the fracturing here, but I would not be surprised. That aside, the size of the molar is enough to confidently ID the specimen, as Shirley Fonda did when it was collected.
Q: What interests you about fossil hunting?
Merckx: For as long as I can remember, I have had a huge interest in the Earth’s past. I think I developed this interest from reading books at a young age about Earth history and extinct animals. The latter is what interests me the most; I love imagining what life was like millions of years ago, and fossils give us enough evidence to spark our imaginations. I find fossil hunting thrilling — I love going to formations and attempting to find the remains of extinct creatures. State College has a lot of great local sites for that, and I have been privileged in going on many field trips in my time at Penn State. I try to insert myself into what the world was like in the past and, at times, how alien it was compared with the modern day. I have never found anything as big or interesting as a dire wolf in the field, but I dream that I will someday.