The great die off of the Pleistocene mega-fauna likely was caused by the perfect storm of warming termperatures, the arrival of us human animals and the spears and disease that we brought with us..............".If you were able to wander around the Ice Age Americas between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago, you would have been able to hear the howls of dire wolves almost everywhere you went".................. "Their bones have been found from southern Alberta, Canada all the way down to Bolivia at elevations from sea level up to 7,400 feet".............. "In the what would become the United States, they loped from coast to coast"................."Dire Wolves were larger and more burly than the gray wolves that were also slinking around during the Pleistocene"............Dire wolves clocked in with an estimated average weight of 130 pounds compared to 88 for gray wolves"..............Note that the largest gray wolves alive in North America today can top off at 120 pounds........... So, just as in the East today where red wolves and coyotes can look very similar, it would have been tough in some cases to tell the difference between Dire and Gray Wolves when both populated the Americas

https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/dire-wolves-were-real/&ct=ga&cd=CAEYASoUMTU0MTAxNzc5NTY0MDg1NzA5NDcyGmRhOTdjZjk0NzgwNDY5OWE6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNH2lA2pSAS7be3adS2oB5oPtxQCrQ

DIRE WOLVES WERE REAL
Game of Thrones characters
like Ghost
 are based on real wolves that used to
 roam the Americas

Scientific American

• By Brian Switek on June 23, 2016