The fierce wolves dominated the ecology of Pleistocene America. Scientists still know very little about this extinct large carnivore, but a new study fills a few gaps. According to a new study involving five genomes of samples dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago, serious wolves were very different from today’s gray wolves, despite their similar appearance.
The last dog area in the Americas
Dirty wolves were first discovered in the 1850s. Their abundant surplus, numbering in the thousands, is spread across the two American continents, from Canada to Bolivia. These were extremely effective predators that could grow up to two meters in length and had skeletal adaptations that made them suitable for capturing large megafauna that roamed the country before the last ice age.
Because of their morphology, scientists have always assumed that distressed wolves and modern wolves must be closely related. But a new study published in the journal this week Earth seems to remind us that similar skeletons and other morphological features do not necessarily reflect kinship.
The research team, which involved scientists at Durham University in the USA and the University of Adelaide in Australia, compiled the DNA from five distressed wolf bones. The scientists started this study to learn more about the biology of distressed wolves, but they were shocked when they found through the genome sequence that the extinct animals shared a common ancestor with living wolf-like dogs about 5.7 million years ago. has. Dirty wolves deviated from African foxes about 5.1 million years ago.
The strong resemblance between the two, strange as it may sound, is therefore simply coincidental – a fine example of converging evolution, in which two unrelated species develop similar adaptations. In this case, two unrelated species had a similar appearance, probably due to similar habitats and ecological niches.
And despite the frequency of hybridization among Canidae members, horrible wolves and the ancestors of modern wolves and coyotes never intervened, meaning they lived in geographical isolation from each other. Yet only one of the two generations survived, and perhaps this lack of mixture possibly contributed to their downfall.
It is possible that the ancestor of gray wolves and coyotes had a number of variants that were more advantageous in the shifting environment, which saw that serious wolves could not adapt during the extinctions of the late Pleistocene. Gray wolves are known for their adaptability. Dirty wolves, it does not look so much.