Talk:Dire Wolf

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WikiProject Dogs
Dogs Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Dogs, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on Canines on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
This article has been marked as needing immediate attention.

Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it needs.

Contents

[edit] fantasy game usage

What about its use in many fantasy based genres, the dire wolf seems to be a constant reference to a greater version, or form, of the normal wolf. I was searching for the fantasy variant, and have yet to find any good references...

Seems like a good idea. The content from Dire Wolves should be merged into this article, perhaps as a new section on fictional occurrences.Deli nk 21:05, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What mass extinction?

The current text states until its extinction about 10,000 years ago during a time of mass extinction of many large North American mammals. However, on the page linked to for Mass extinction there is nothing about any mass exctinctions about 10,000 years ago.

[edit] New Pictures

I have some new picture that I'd like to put on the artical. -- Hurricane Devon (Talk), September 17, 2005

[edit] Prehistoric mammal category thoughts

My personal opinion is that while it is good to have the distinctions between the different Epochs, the category of prehistoric mammals should still be included as many in the general public are unaware of which specific Epoch their mammal was from. Essentially, it would be like having two card catalog references. I agree that the Epoch distinctions are more accurate and if I had to chose one or the other, that would be the one I would keep. But I think there is still value in maintaining the old cat. Or perhaps prehistoric mammals could become just a list of, provided all of hte current mammals ended up on the list. Any thoughts?

--aremisasling 21:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization and disambiguation

UtherSRG, the capitalization style is meant for article titles, not for refering to animals in the body of the article. When you reverted the capitalizations, you also brought back the ambiguated links that I had corrected, so I reverted it back. If you must recapitalize everything, I won't fight you, but please leave the links alone or pipe them to avoid redirects. Image:Tycon.jpgCoyoty 21:36, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

UtherSRG, if you insist on capitalizing animals, at least please be consistent about it. A mix of capitalized and uncapitalized names looks really ugly and unprofessional in an encyclopedia. Lets have some concensus about this. Image:Tycon.jpgCoyoty 04:03, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cultural references

Does the song "Dire Wolf" have anything to do with dire wolves other than the title? If not, should it be included on name association alone? Image:Tycon.jpgCoyoty 02:01, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it does, the description doesn't indicate any. If there is none, I would support removing it. MarcusGraly 22:07, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Here are the lyrics: [link to copyvio website removed]: It does mention wolves a fair amount. MarcusGraly 18:42, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
Dire Wolf is a song by the famous Canadian band "The Tragically Hip" Canking 15:22, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Or, you know, the Grateful Dead. They most likely did it first. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.141.107.24 (talk) 03:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mythic beasts

I took the liberty of removing claims that various wolf like mythic beasts were in fact Dire Wolves. These claims seem to based on the myth that a Dire Wolf was a huge Grey Wolf and are unverifiable. MarcusGraly 22:12, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citations

The article claims that dire wolves were smaller than grey wolves, but I have heard otherwise, from the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. Should someone change this? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 139.140.194.172 (talk • contribs) .

Yes, if you can find a reliable source for the information. - UtherSRG (talk) 11:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Misconception"

The article states that it is a misconception that dire wolves were bigger than grey wolves, then goes on to say that they were in fact bigger. Based on the numbers in the gray wolf article, the biggest dire wolves weighed half again as much as the biggest grey wolves. That seems like a pretty significant size difference--not a misconception at all. I'm going to change. Nareek 21:04, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

--It is a misconcepton. According to the links on the page itself, dire wolves were only slightly larger than gray wolves (110 lbs). Some people have been playing too much D&D. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.175.119.20 (talk) 15:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't make sense to say that dire wolves were larger/chunkier than gray wolves, but that they weighed 110 lbs--which is right in the middle of the average weight range for the gray wolf. So was it larger/chunkier or not? 70.213.43.203 (talk) 23:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
110 lbs. is not the average for either the gray wolf (except possibly in some parts of Alaska or Siberia) or the dire wolf.
Most places, a gray wolf (timber wolf subspecies) is something like 60-75 pounds. The possible weight range is huge, though (20 pounds for an Arabian Wolf subspecies up to a record-setting Alaskan giant of 180 lbs). Since 100 pounds is right in the middle of that range, people tend to think that wolves average around 100 lbs. or a little more. Especially in temperate latitudes, they do not.
The dire wolf does not average that weight either. [This museum website] says 125-175 pounds. [This] uses the 110 pounds, but that is the smallest estimate you will find. I tend to see that more often as a low-end figure. Vultur (talk) 19:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Images

I wonder if anyone can find some public license images generated by a computer for this article. That would be great. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mathchem271828 (talk • contribs) 20:51, 8 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] capitalization

"Grey Wolf" and "Dire Wolf" is not a proper name - I don't believe it should be capitalized. ClockworkTroll 21:27, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Neither the title nor the name in the text should be capitalized. I'll change this if there are no objections. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Night Gyr (talk • contribs) 17:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC).

I object. - UtherSRG (talk) 17:49, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Why? It's nonstandard to capitalize species names. We don't capitalize rainbow trout or human, and it looks weird to me to capitalize common words. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 20:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Ah, but we should. The rationale at WP:BIRD is sound. - UtherSRG (talk) 12:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
The capitalization convention in WP:BIRD is based on the conventions of ornithological journals, and it's not clear that journals about mammals have the same convention. Even if it were, it's dubious to extend the convention of a specialist literature--where it may make sense to capitalize only one kind of common noun, because it's the particular class of common noun that you're interested in--to a general encyclopedia, where you have an interest in every category of common noun. I think the bird capitalization rule is a mistake and should not be a precedent mammal articles should follow. Nareek 12:59, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] See also?

The article has under "See also" a link to Extinct animals in popular culture. However, that article does not exist. I think it is very stupid to reference a non-existent article like this one, so I'm removing it. I will also add a few real "See also"s while I'm at it. Garnet avi 11:22, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reference

There is a reference so I will remove tag. Enlil Ninlil 19:40, 5 June 2007 (UTC)