Larisa DeSantis

Media Appearances

• Five Shocking Animal Hybrids That Truly Exist in Nature, From Narlugas to Grolar Bears to Coywolves

  “Apex predators help stabilize ecosystems, and looking forward, I really hope the Arctic still has a polar bear,” Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University, told Live Science’s Ben Turner in 2021. “But, with that all being said, could the pizzly allow for bears to continue to exist in intermediate regions of the Arctic? Possibly, yes. That’s why we need to continue to study them.”

  March 21st, 2024

• Dogged by climate change and human hunters, a mammoth’s life is written in her tusks

  “The idea that humans would have been aware of and influenced by mammoth behavior … makes complete sense,” says Larisa Grawe DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University. Existing Dené dialects may reflect that ancient awareness, says study co-author Gerad Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Several preserve a word, negutih and variations thereof, that roughly translates to “a creature carrying a singular object in front of its face”— perhaps a mammoth and its trunk.

  January 17th, 2024

• Saber-Tooth Cats and Dire Wolves Carried a Terrible Disease in Their Bones

  Just from bones, it’s unclear why OCD struck the way it did. Nor can the researchers say for sure how it affected the animals’ quality of life or mobility. In modern domestic animals, the disease can cause varying levels of pain and lameness. In early life, these bone defects can heal on their own; it may not have been much of an impairment, at least for some individuals. The animals’ social behavior also may have mitigated the worst of the disease, said Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study.

  July 12th, 2023

• Polar bears are inbreeding because climate change is rapidly melting their habitat - sparking fears that their offspring could become infertile

  Paleontologist Larisa DeSantis told DailyMail.com that polar bears are retreating inland to find food, since sea ice is melting, and are mating with grizzly bears that travel up to Alaska.

  September 9th, 2021

• Saber-toothed cats stalked and ate baby mammoths

  "Essentially you are what you eat," study coauthor and paleontologist Larisa DeSantis, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told CNN. "In the case of carnivores, we can tell if they were eating things that ate Carbon-4 (warm season) grasses or were they eating things that ate Carbon-3 (cool season) shrubs."

  April 28th, 2021

• Baby Mammoths Were Meals for These Saber-Tooth Cats

  “Everything that we looked at basically told us that Smilodon and Homotherium are totally different cats,” said Larisa DeSantis, the paper’s lead author and a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University. She adds that although they were more closely related to each other than to any cat species living today, “They were able to coexist in these ecosystems likely due to having very different dietary niches.”

  April 27th, 2021

• Meet the 'pizzly bear': Critically endangered polar bears are mating with grizzly bears in Alaska and creating a hybrid animal that is more resilient to climate change

  Paleontologist Larisa DeSantis told DailyMail.com that polar bears are retreating inland to find food, since sea ice is melting, and are mating with grizzly bears that travel up to Alaska.

  April 13th, 2021

• The Real Dire Wolf Ran Into an Evolutionary Dead End

  Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the research, said it “is consistent with the idea of a North American origin of dire wolves.”

  January 13th, 2021

• The Dire Wolf Might Have Prowled Asia, Fossil Suggests

  It would be “exceptionally interesting” if dire wolves really had migrated into Asia, said Larisa R. G. DeSantis, a vertebrate paleontologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who was not involved in the research. But this is just one specimen, she cautioned, and it is notoriously difficult to differentiate species of canines based on the shapes of their bones and teeth alone.

  October 15th, 2020

• Fossils in La Brea Tar Pits reveal why coyotes still exist, but not saber-toothed cats

  Vanderbilt University paleontologist Larisa DeSantis grew up visiting the fossil site in Hancock Park. Over the last decade, DeSantis used a dentistry approach to study the teeth of now-extinct predators like saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and American lions. She applied the same approach to the teeth recovered from the pits that belonged to ancient ancestors of gray wolves, coyotes and cougars.

  August 5th, 2019

• Hyenas Once Stalked The Arctic, Fossils Reveal

  Researchers have long assumed hyenas must have passed into North America via the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, when sea levels were lower, but this is the first hard evidence that hyenas could survive well enough in Arctic environments to make that journey. “It’s really fun and exciting to see that hyenas were in fact in the Arctic and that they did take this migration route,” says Larisa DeSantis, an expert on fossil carnivores at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the research. “It confirms what people had long thought … that these hyenas had come through Beringia and the land bridge to make it into more southern regions of North America.”

  June 23rd, 2019