Today I learned: the Dire Wolf, beloved and weirdly-named antagonist of low-level Dungeons and Dragons players, is actually a real (extinct) species, Canis dirus. It wasn't nearly as big as the Monster Manual describes, being about the same size as an ordinary wolf, but it was around at the same time as the the sabre-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis—another entry in the "animals with really cool names" category.