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	Dire wolf is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
	This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on July 17, 2017.
Article milestones Date Process Result January 12, 2017 Good article nominee Listed April 20, 2017 Peer review Reviewed May 29, 2017 Featured article candidate Promoted
Current status: Featured article

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I will be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about how the whole taxonomic system works, but I do know that if you want to change peoples' minds, you need to put it in their faces, ie. newspaper ads, magazine covers, billboards, and more recently, Google searches. I saw it discussed here, after or when it had been done, that the infobox had been changed to Aenocyon. Now, do a Google search of Canis dirus dirus and look at the results, in particular the sidebar or, if you will, the infobox. Wikipedia may not consider itself a reliable source, but a good portion of the rest of the world does. By allowing the change to stand, even though the experts still haven't reached a consensus, means we have now violated WP:CRYSTAL. One of you Guardians of the Sciences should address this: I'm not that bold, and I'm likely to screw it up.  — Myk Streja ^(beep) 15:49, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Since it's not really controversial, it's fairly standard to follow such revisions here. In case a future DNA study finds fault with the last one, we'll just change the article accordingly, wouldn't be the first time. FunkMonk (talk) 16:21, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@FunkMonk: Well, I'm writing for an online story site (nope, not sharing that), and as part of my research I'm investigating the dire wolf (sabertooth, too). That's why I got to here and saw the discussions. The article confused me and now I see why. That said, another site I went to, the San Diego Wildlife Alliance Library, doesn't even mention Aenocyon, and it was last updated March 2021. See where I'm going? Should we be embracing this change so quickly? Everywhere else is either strictly Canis or they're hedging and saying Canis/Aenocyon. And there's my two pence. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Myk Streja (talk • contribs)

Why would the San Diego Wildlife Alliance Library be a relevant authority for animals that became extinct ten thousand years ago? While for living (and to a lesser extent, recently extinct) animals Wikipedia defers to external authorities for classification, for extinct animals the taxonomy is essentially based on whatever happens to be the prevailing name used. Genetic results are typically more reliable than morphological results because they are not subject to homoplasy. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:31, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'm not sure the website of a zoo would even be up to date with the latest palaeontological research anyway, so not particularly relevant. And if you look at the page's citations, the newest is from 2010, so it's not like they've taken a stand on this issue at all, it just relies on decade old sources. FunkMonk (talk) 01:36, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The key point is that the genus Aenocyon has been proposed (reinstated?) by 50 evolutionary biologists, and nobody has rebutted it. Therefore, it is not contentious and to claim that "the experts still haven't reached a consensus" is rebutted on the facts. William Harris (talk) 08:00, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Strebe I should’ve mentioned this in the edit comments, but the changes I made were ones that @FunkMonk, @Hemiauchenia, and I agreed to in the Columbian mammoth talk page. The radiocarbon dates in the 20th and early 21st century dates are uncalibrated, an issue that is addressed by the more accurate calibrated radiocarbon dates as for instance discussed in the edit history for Megalonyx. PrimalMustelid (talk) 13:28, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@PrimalMustelid: Sounds good. Your edits left in place citations that contradict the edits, so we would need to find suitable replacements. Besides the dates, there is count of extinct megafauna genera, for example. Obviously Stuart is reliable, but if there is controversy remaining among experts, we should be careful about relying on a single reference. Strebe (talk) 17:10, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It would appear that some paleobiologists are not buying the paleogeneticists re-classification to genus Aenocyon, based on the latest paper here.
We need to keep in mind that Perri et al 2021 did not reveal which of the two mutation rates often used by wolf geneticists was used to give a date of genetic divergence of 5.7 million years ago. The dating may be out by a factor of x2, with the possibility that the age is actually 2.8 million years - which puts the dire wolf straight back into genus Canis once again. Time will tell. 14.2.192.61 (talk) 08:06, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They don't even attempt to refute that study nor do they comment on its results, so saying they aren't "buying into it" is an overstatement. FunkMonk (talk) 09:49, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This particular group of researchers classified dirus as genus Canis and not Aenocyon is all that I am highlighting. 14.2.192.61 (talk) 10:24, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]