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Illustration of a Pleistocene wolf cranium that was found in Kents Cavern, Torquay, England [1]. It is widely agreed that the evolutionary lineage of the grey wolf can be traced back 2 million years to the Early Pleistocene species Canis etruscus, and its successor the Middle Pleistocene Canis mosbachensis.
The wolf (Canis lupus; [b] pl.: wolves), also known as the grey wolf or gray wolf, is a canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, including the dog and dingo , though grey wolves, as popularly understood, only comprise naturally-occurring wild subspecies.
The phylogenetic tree resolved into 19 clades that included both modern and ancient wolves, which showed that the most basal clades included the Indian grey wolf and the Himalayan wolf, with a subclade of wolves from China and Mongolia falling within the Himalayan wolf clade.
The wolf-sized C. chihliensis appeared in northern China in the Mid-Pliocene around 4-3 million YBP. This was followed by an explosion of Canis evolution across Eurasia in the Early Pleistocene around 1.8 million YBP in what is commonly referred to as the wolf event.
DNA sequences can be mapped to reveal a phylogenetic tree that represents evolutionary relationships, with each branch point representing the divergence of two lineages from a common ancestor. On this tree the term basal is used to describe a lineage that forms a branch diverging nearest to the common ancestor. [11]
Ethiopian wolf skull: Despite its close relation to the grey wolf, convergent evolution has resulted in a skull similar in shape to that of jackals and the South American maned wolf. [ 20 ] Due to the high density of rodents in their new Afroalpine habitat, the ancestors of the Ethiopian wolf gradually developed into specialised rodent hunters.
Convergent evolution—the repeated evolution of similar traits in multiple lineages which all ancestrally lack the trait—is rife in nature, as illustrated by the examples below. The ultimate cause of convergence is usually a similar evolutionary biome , as similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ...
The position of the National Academies is that the historic population of Mexican wolf represents a distinct evolutionary lineage of gray wolf, and that modern Mexican wolves are their direct descendants. It is a valid taxonomic subspecies classified as Canis lupus baileyi. [14]