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Canidae is a family of mammals in the order Carnivora, which includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, and many other extant and extinct dog-like mammals. A member of this family is called a canid; all extant species are a part of a single subfamily, Caninae , and are called canines.
Canidae (/ ˈ k æ n ɪ d iː /; [3] from Latin, canis, "dog") is a biological family of dog-like carnivorans, colloquially referred to as dogs, and constitutes a clade. A member of this family is also called a canid ( / ˈ k eɪ n ɪ d / ). [ 4 ]
The study suggests that at some point in time, female coyotes managed to mate with some of the male wolves of the remnant wild Mexican wolf populations. Analysis on the haplotype of some coyotes from Texas also detected the presence of male wolf introgression, such as Y chromosomes from the gray wolves in the southern coyotes.
Canids also show a wide range of parental care and in 2018 a study showed that sexual conflict plays a role in the determination of intersexual parental investment. [29] The studied looked at coyote mating pairs and found that paternal investment was increased to match or near match the maternal investment.
Family Canidae (dogs and other canids) includes wolves, dogs, coyotes, and foxes, as well as a number of less familiar animals. The family is currently divided into two major groups, the true dogs (tribe Canini), which includes nine genera, and the true foxes (tribe Vulpini) with two genera.
Coyotes may kill fox kits, but this is not a major source of mortality. [156] In southern California, coyotes frequently kill gray foxes, and these smaller canids tend to avoid areas with high coyote densities. [157] In some areas, coyotes share their ranges with bobcats.
In 2016, a whole-genome DNA study suggested that all of the North American canids, both wolves and coyotes, diverged from a common ancestor 6,000–117,000 years ago. The whole-genome sequence analysis shows that two endemic species of North American wolf, the red wolf and eastern wolf, are admixtures of the coyote and gray wolf.
Some 15% of 10,000 coyotes taken annually in Illinois for their coats during the early 1980s may have been coydogs based on cranial measurements. As the coyote population in Illinois at the time was estimated at 20,000–30,000, this would suggest a population of 3,000–4,500 coydogs in the state. [ 8 ]