Natural History

Posted in wild dogs, wolves | Tagged Canis lupus pallipes, India, Indian wolf, Wolf | 5 Comments

5 Responses

1. on December 12, 2016 at 10:03 am massugu

   Similar eco-pressures?

   
   
2. on December 15, 2016 at 1:50 pm Scott

   cool you don’t see much on Indian wolves

   
   
3. on January 1, 2017 at 3:14 am TJ

   While it could be from similar environmental pressures, considering it is one of basal (earliest forms) of gray wolf it does make sense they would share more features with coyotes than later subspecies.

   
   
   • on January 1, 2017 at 5:09 am retrieverman

     I would have said exactly that same thing until the most recent full-genome comparisons came out. Coyotes and the Holarctic wolf didn’t split until around 50,000 years ago, so the most recent common ancestor wasn’t a primitive wolf that lived 800,000 years ago but a more derived Eurasian wolf. These million-year-old “coyote” remains aren’t actually coyotes, but another form of jackal-like Canis.

     Yeah, I basically had to scrap all of that, because I did have a post on here about coyotes as primitive wolves.

     
     
   • on January 1, 2017 at 5:19 am retrieverman

     I haven’t written about this yet, but Fan et al found through DNA that all extant wolf lineages (including Indian wolves) are much more recently derived that the commonly cited studies that US mtDNA and claim ancient origin for the Indian wolf:

     http://genome.cshlp.org/content/26/2/163.full.pdf+html

     The Himalayan wolf, which actually might be a distinct species, wasn’t included in this study, because I don’t think anyone has good genetic material from them.

     
     

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