“The main predators are rare in the fossil record due to their position in the food pyramid. The devastating wounds that heal are even uncommon. Fossils that preserve the horrific wounds of the remote afterlife have long fascinated paleontologists, and tell stories told infrequently. “Dr. Xiaoming Wang, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County, who co-directed the study, noted.
Dr. Haowen Tong, professor at the Institute of Paleontology and Vertebrate Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, led excavations that discovered fossils in the Nihewan Basin, a well-known Ice Age site in northern China.
Based on its skeleton, C. chihliensis is a giant dog with robust jaws and teeth, specializing in eating meat and breaking bones. Skeleton injuries provide more evidence of how the animal moved and behaved. The test represents the first known report of dental infection in C. chihliensis, probably going through crushing bones to succeed in the bone marrow inside, which fashionable wolves do when they hunt giant prey than them.
A C. chihliensis also severely fractured the tibia, splitting it into 3 parts. The wound should have neutralized the wolf, an active predator that hunted for its prey, but survived, as evidenced by bone healing. Survival suggests that when he recovered, he received food in addition to hunting, probably with that of a herd.
To help interpret the lesions, the study also examined specimens of another extinct giant canine: the terrible wolf, Canis dirus, which has abundant fossils on the famous Rancho La Brea asphalt in Los Angeles, California. The terrible wolf geologically younger than C. chihliensis, having lived in Rancho La Brea about 55,000 to 11,000 years ago. Despite the age difference, the horrible wolf, which previous studies had established as a predator of the persecution of giant prey, with a social distribution probably similar to that of gray wolves today – suffered injuries to teeth, jaws and legs similar to C. chihliensis.