http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/03/06/3708755.htm
Falkland Islands wolf mystery solved
The 320-year-old mystery of the origins of the now-extinct Falkland Islands wolf and how it came to be the only land-based mammal on the island has been solved by Australian researchers.
In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Adelaide suggest the wolf may have walked to the island about 16,000 years ago during the last ice age.
The origin of the Falkland Islands wolf – which looked like a cross between a wolf and a fox – has been a natural history mystery since it was first encountered by European visitors in the late 1700s.
During his famous Beagle voyage, Charles Darwin was also mystified by the wolf’s existence on the barren islands, almost 500 kilometres from the South American mainland.
“As far as I am aware, there is no other instance in any part of the world, of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large a quadruped peculiar to itself,” Darwin wrote in 1834.
Co-lead author of the new paper, Associate Professor Jeremy Austin, deputy director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, says previous DNA work suggested the Falkland Islands wolf diverged from its closest living relative, the South American maned wolf Chrysocyon brachyurus around seven million years ago.
These studies then estimated the wolf, Dusicyon australis, colonised the islands about 330,000 years ago by unknown means.
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