Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.
Nature. 2021 Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub 2021 Jan 13.
Dire wolves are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Here, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil remains dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization across Canidae, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes. This suggests that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire wolves, while the ancestors of grey wolves, coyotes and dholes evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.
恐狼被认为是更新世美洲最常见和分布最广的大型食肉动物之一，但人们对它们的进化或灭绝知之甚少。在这里，为了重建恐狼的进化历史，我们对五个来自 13000 到 50000 多年前的化石遗骸的基因组进行了测序。我们的结果表明，尽管它们在形态上与现存的灰狼相似，但恐狼是一个高度分化的谱系，它们与现存的犬科动物在大约 570 万年前就已经分开了。与犬科动物中众多杂交的例子不同，恐狼与北美灰狼或郊狼之间没有基因流动的证据。这表明恐狼是在与这些物种的更新世祖先隔离的情况下进化而来的。我们的结果还支持恐狼起源于新大陆的早期假说，而灰狼、郊狼和豺的祖先则在欧亚大陆进化，并在相对较近的时间才迁徙到北美。
