The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch | S5 E4 | Dead Canine Named As Being An Extinct Dire Wolf [HD] [2024]

What is that? We’re about to find out what it is. Look at those things.
E God, we got a dead animal right here. I wonder what that is just a few hundred feet down the river from where I found this burnt tree.
We came across some sort of animal here in the late stages of decay. As soon as we lifted its head out of the water, we saw massive canine teeth, so we knew it was a canine of some type.
But these teeth are pretty big. It doesn’t look like a coyote or a dog to me. So what is dead here in the water?
You think you can hold it up?
All right, let me get a bag.
We’re still going to try and get a sample of it and give it to Ben, the biologist, that’s been working with us on the ranch.

Oh, I got a whiff of that.
Yeah, that stinks. Good God.
That decayed carcass that we found in the Southfield Creek was really disgusting, but it was also one of the strangest things we’d ever seen on Skinwalker Ranch.
The body wasn’t very big, but the teeth were huge.
Well, those teeth are sharp, dude. Touched it.
I didn’t know what to make of it, but no matter how bad that thing stunk, we had to get a piece of that jaw so Ben Woodruff could analyze it to figure out what kind of animal it actually was.

[Music]
Oh man, that stinks.
I want to give you a couple of examples here, some comparative anatomy.
So this is a side view of a typical coyote skull, and I want you to focus down here at the bottom.
You can see this bulge is not very big. This is the part of the jaw that undergoes the most stress when these teeth here are crunching down, so keep that in mind.
Keep the shape in mind.
This is a regular modern-day gray wolf, and they’re tackling larger prey, up to the size of moose or even buffalo.
And you can see how much larger that is.

And this is a dire wolf.
You can see down below here how much larger that bulge is. It’s huge.
Yeah, here is the dentition on your jaw that has the much thicker, larger bulge, like a dire wolf.
Look at that.
What? You kidding me? No way.

I don’t want to put out a hypothesis, but if you handed me this and said, “Hey, what is this?”
Everything I’m measuring, everything I’m looking at, says it looks like it has dire wolf in it or is a young dire wolf.
But I’m hoping we can do a DNA test.
If we can prove this is a legit dire wolf, that would be the first physical evidence that we’ve been given from anybody that suggests that the Shermans actually saw a dire wolf trying to pull their cows through the fence.

We love everything about your approach, Ben.
And I am so grateful for everything you’ve shared with us.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your results with us.
We’ll collect more samples and hopefully talk to you soon.
Great. Thank you.
I look forward to coming out again.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
Wow, dire wolf.