Mystery of the Falklands Wolf - solved or not?

Despite the fact that TheIndependent intimates that the Puzzle of the Falklands Wolf is close to being resolved, that certainly isn't the case. There may be some new evidence, but scientist remain as puzzled as today as Charles Darwin was a century ago.

The puzzle, if you aren't familiar with it, is how the heck these large mammals came to inhabit the Falklands when these isles are so far away from any major land mass.

Prof. Slater is quoted in ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2009) as saying:

"It's really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid.... There are no other native terrestrial mammals -- not even a mouse. It's even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometers from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?"

ScienceDaily then goes on to say that [P]ossible explanations for the wolves' presence on the islands, which have never been connected to the South American mainland, range from dispersal by ice or logs to domestication and subsequent transport by Native Americans. Ultimately, the Falklands wolf died out because it was perceived as a threat to settlers and their sheep, although fur traders took out a lot of the population as well.

To determine the wolf's ancestral lineage, ScienceNow explains that Graham Slater, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues compared DNA sequences from five museum specimens with those of living South American canids, including a group of foxlike animals that had been previously suggested as their most likely relatives. The team found that the Falklands wolves proved most similar to the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), which hails from the South American savannas.

"That was a big surprise," says Slater, because of the pronounced difference between the two creatures. The maned wolf has much longer legs than the Falklands wolf and long jaws suited for catching rats and mice; the island wolf has shorter, Labrador retriever-like jaws designed for grabbing and shaking large prey, such as seals and penguins.

The study, published online tomorrow in Current Biology, points to a North American origin for all South American canids. The Falklands Island Wolf and the maned wolf diverged 6.7 million years ago, probably in North America given that the oldest fossils of canids in South America date back 2.5 million years, says Slater.

So essentially we have more information, but nothing conclusive or terribly helpful, except that we can pretty much exclude humans from the equation.


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ScienceDaily

ScienceNow

TheIndependent