Wolves maned Pleistocene

White Wolf Pack

 - a surviving species from the Pleistocene Extinction (Video)

The Maned wolf is a very fascinating animal. Despite its name, the maned wolf is not a wolf at all, or a fox, coyote, or dog. It is the only member of the Chrysocyon genus, making it a truly unique animal, not closely related to any other living canid. It is believed that the maned wolf is the last surviving species of the Pleistocene Extinction, which wiped out all other large canids from the continent.

The maned wolf is native to South America, but is mainly found in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru. The ancestors of the maned wolf are thought to have spread from North to South America about two million years ago. Broken away from other wolf species in North America, the maned wolf evolved into the unique animal that it is today.

It is known as the "stilt-legged fox" because that is what it mostly resembles. It is around 3 feet high, and weighs around 50 pounds, with most of that height coming from the legs. It is also a beautiful red color, with black and white highlights, much like the red fox.

 Wolves Coyotes survivors

Coyotes are champions of change and have evolved in clever ways to take advantage of a human-dominated landscape

Wolf genes make the coyotes of northeastern North America bigger and stronger than those elsewhere. Image: KITCHIN AND HURST/ALL CANADA PHOTOS/CORBIS

Sharon Levy of Nature magazine

Near the dawn of time, the story goes, Coyote saved the creatures of Earth. According to the mythology of Idaho's Nez Perce people, the monster Kamiah had stalked into the region and was gobbling up the animals one by one. The crafty Coyote evaded Kamiah but didn't want to lose his friends, so he let himself be swallowed. From inside the beast, Coyote severed Kamiah's heart and freed his fellow animals. Then he chopped up Kamiah and threw the pieces to the winds, where they gave birth to the peoples of the planet.

European colonists took a very different view of the coyote (Canis latrans) and other predators native to North America. The settlers hunted wolves to extinction across most of the southerly 48 states. They devastated cougar and bobcat populations and attacked coyotes. But unlike the other predators, coyotes have thrived in the past 150 years. Once restricted to the western plains, they now occupy most of the continent and have invaded farms and cities, where they have expanded their diet to include squirrels, household pets and discarded fast food.

Researchers have long known the coyote as a master of adaptation, but studies over the past few years are now revealing how these unimposing relatives of wolves and dogs have managed to succeed where many other creatures have suffered. Coyotes have flourished in part by exploiting the changes that people have made to the environment, and their opportunism goes back thousands of years. In the past two centuries, coyotes have taken over part of the wolf's former ecological niche by preying on deer and even on an endangered group of caribou. Genetic studies reveal that the coyotes of northeastern America — which are bigger than their cousins elsewhere — carry wolf genes that their ancestors picked up through interbreeding. This lupine inheritance has given northeastern coyotes the ability to bring down adult deer — a feat seldom attempted by the smaller coyotes of the west.

 Wolves Dogs domestication

 How The Dog Became A Dog

Mark Derr

That dogs are descended from wolves is widely accepted as scientific truth, bolstered by a wealth of genetic, behavioral, and ecological studies. But how, where, and when that transformation occurred remain topics of intense, often passionate debate. Was it 12,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Middle East, less than 16,000 years ago in Southern China, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in the Middle East, 135,000 years ago in a place or places unknown, or none and all of the above?

Contradictory though the dates appear, when combined with recent archaeological evidence for early dogs dating from 33,000 to 16,000 years ago across Eurasia from Belgium through the Ukraine to the Altai Mountains in Mongolia, they raise the prospect that wherever early humans and wolves met on the trail of the migrating herds of grazing animals they hunted--horses, reindeer and aurochs, for example--they formed alliances.

In many ways, humans and wolves were made for each other. Both were highly social species who lived and hunted as family units where cooperation was essential to survival. Some scholars have suggested that early humans learned to hunt big game by watching, following, and stealing from wolves. It is also possible that wolves benefitted from following human hunters who with fire and spears were more profligate and efficient killers.

These alliances could have occurred among highly sociable wolves and humans in many times and places. If the wolves reproduced in or near human encampments, the more sociable of their offspring may well have stayed around or taken up with other humans. These dogwolves, or dog-like wolves, came and went, depending on the availability of mates or their own level or sociability. Just as human society was apparently stable for thousands of years, so could this pattern have persisted unchanged.

But over time in several places, some of these established dogwolf populations began to change, ever so slightly in response to changing diet and and living conditions. They began to breed more with each other than with local wolves, and they became more reliably sociable and devoted to human camp life.