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True members of Canis, namely the gray wolf and coyote, likely only arrived in the New World during the Late Pleistocene, where their dietary flexibility and/or ability to hybridize with other canids allowed them to survive the Quaternary extinction event, unlike the dire wolf. [14] Xenocyon (strange wolf) is an extinct subgenus of Canis. [15]
This canine has been named Canis latrans var. [3] and has been referred to as the eastern coyote, northeastern coyote, coywolf, [4] and the southern tweed wolf. [5] [6]Coyotes and wolves first hybridized in the Great Lakes region, followed by a hybrid coyote expansion that created the largest mammalian hybrid zone known. [7]
The eastern wolf probably was a result of a wolf-coyote admixture, combined with extensive backcrossing with parent gray wolf populations. The red wolf may have originated during a time of declining wolf populations in the Southeastern Woodlands, forcing a wolf-coyote hybridization, as well as backcrossing with local parent coyote populations ...
The proposed timing of the wolf/coyote divergence conflicts with the finding of a coyote-like specimen in strata dated to 1 million years before present. [41] In 2017 a group of canid researchers challenged the 2016 whole-genome DNA study's finding that the red wolf and the eastern wolf were the result of recent coyote–gray wolf hybridization.
North American wolf biologists and geneticists also concluded that C. rufus and C. lupus lycaon were genetically more similar to each other than either was to C. lupus or C. latrans (B. T. Kelly, unpubl.). In 2002, morphometric analyses of skulls also indicate that the red wolf is likely not to be a gray wolf–coyote hybrid (Nowak 2002).
The red wolf is an enigmatic taxon, of which there are two proposals over its origin. One is that the red wolf is a distinct species (C. rufus) that has undergone human-influenced admixture with coyotes. The other is that it was never a distinct species but was derived from past admixture between coyotes and gray wolves, due to the gray wolf ...
Human beings have trapped and hunted some canid species for their fur and some, especially the gray wolf, the coyote and the red fox, for sport. [64] Canids such as the dhole are now endangered in the wild because of persecution, habitat loss, a depletion of ungulate prey species and transmission of diseases from domestic dogs.
This study showed that there was a 3.2 % divergence between the eastern Canadian wolf and coyote gene sequences, and a 2.3 % sequence divergence between the red wolf and coyote haplotypes. However, the divergence was a much greater 8.0% between gray wolf (C. lupus) mtDNA and eastern/red wolf haplotypes, and 10.0% between gray wolf and coyote ...