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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.
Its genetic diversity was higher than that of its modern counterparts, implying that the wolf population of the Late Pleistocene was larger than the present population. Modern North American wolves are not their descendants, and this supports the existence of a separate origin for ancient and extant North American wolves. [5]
Coyotes from Missouri, Illinois, and Florida exhibit 5–10% wolf ancestry. There was 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry in red wolves, 60%:40% in eastern wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes wolves. There was 10% coyote ancestry in Mexican wolves, 5% in Pacific Coast and Yellowstone wolves, and less than 3% in Canadian archipelago wolves. [12]
The eastern wolf has two proposals over its origin. One is that the eastern wolf is a distinct species (C. lycaon) that evolved in North America, as opposed to the gray wolf that evolved in the Old World, and is related to the red wolf. The other is that it is derived from admixture between gray wolves, which inhabited the Great Lakes area and ...
Beringian wolves possessed a craniodental morphology that was more specialized than modern gray wolves and Rancho La Brea wolves for capturing, dismembering, and consuming the bones of very large megaherbivores, [8] [18] having evolved this way due to the presence of megafauna. [53] Their stronger jaws and teeth indicate a hypercarnivorous ...
According to federal data, more than 30 whales have been found washed up along the eastern shore since Dec. 1, with over a dozen of them off the coast of New York and New Jersey. To get a sense of ...
Commercial whalers hunted North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction by the early 1890s. NOAA tweeted Thursday that right whales are currently on the move along the East Coast, heading ...
The traditional hypothesis of cetacean evolution, first proposed by Van Valen in 1966, [9] was that whales were related to the mesonychians, an extinct order of carnivorous ungulates (hoofed animals) that resembled wolves with hooves and were a sister group of the artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates). This hypothesis was proposed due to ...