Abstract
The Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus), restricted today largely to South and Southeast Asia, was widespread throughout Eurasia and even reached North America during the Pleistocene. Like many other species, it suffered from a huge range loss towards the end of the Pleistocene and went extinct in most of its former distribution. The fossil record of the dhole is scattered and the identification of fossils can be complicated by an overlap in size and a high morphological similarity between dholes and other canid species. We generated almost complete mitochondrial genomes for six putative dhole fossils from Europe. By using three lines of evidence, i.e., the number of reads mapping to various canid mitochondrial genomes, the evaluation and quantification of the mapping evenness along the reference genomes and phylogenetic analysis, we were able to identify two out of six samples as dhole, whereas four samples represent wolf fossils. This highlights the contribution genetic data can make when trying to identify the species affiliation of fossil specimens. The ancient dhole sequences are highly divergent when compared to modern dhole sequences, but the scarcity of dhole data for comparison impedes a more extensive analysis.
Highlights
Many species’ common names are derived from their modern distribution, this may not reflect the full range of a species’ former distribution, as in the case of the Tasmanian devil [1]
Ancient samples have been identified as dhole (Cuon alpinus or Cuon alpinus europaeus) based on morphological characteristics of the bones analysed or bones that had been found in close proximity and were assumed to originate from the same animal [25,26,27]
We reconstructed mitochondrial genomes of six fossil specimens initially identified as dhole and found that more than half had to be reassigned as gray wolves
Summary
Many species’ common names are derived from their modern distribution, this may not reflect the full range of a species’ former distribution, as in the case of the Tasmanian devil [1]. During the Pleistocene, many species had a much wider geographical distribution than they do today, for example, leopards [2] and spotted hyenas [3], both of which ranged across all of Eurasia and Africa prior to the last glacial maximum. Fossil findings of the Asiatic wild dog, referred to as dhole or cuon, indicate a former occurrence throughout both Asia and Europe, and even extending to parts of. The dhole is assumed to have gone extinct from most of its Pleistocene distribution at the end of the Pleistocene or the beginning of the Holocene [3,8]. Dholes are restricted to South and Southeast Asia [12,13,14]. Continuous population decline, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural
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