Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage

Dire wolves are considered one of the most common and widespread large
carnivores in Pleistocene America, yet relatively little is known
about their evolution or extinction. To reconstruct the evolutionary
history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil bones
dating from 13,000 to over 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that
though they were similar morphologically to the extant gray wolf, dire
wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids ~5.7
million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization
across Canidae, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire
wolves and either North American gray wolves or coyotes. This suggests
that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of
these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire
wolves, while the ancestors of gray wolves, coyotes, and dholes evolved in
Eurasia and only colonized North America relatively recently.