Genome-wide Evidence Reveals that African and Eurasian Golden Jackals Are Distinct Species - PubMed (original) (raw)
. 2015 Aug 17;25(16):2158-65.
doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.06.060. Epub 2015 Jul 30.
John Pollinger 2, Raquel Godinho 3, Jacqueline Robinson 2, Amanda Lea 4, Sarah Hendricks 5, Rena M Schweizer 2, Olaf Thalmann 6, Pedro Silva 7, Zhenxin Fan 8, Andrey A Yurchenko 9, Pavel Dobrynin 9, Alexey Makunin 9, James A Cahill 10, Beth Shapiro 10, Francisco Álvares 7, José C Brito 7, Eli Geffen 11, Jennifer A Leonard 12, Kristofer M Helgen 13, Warren E Johnson 14, Stephen J O'Brien 15, Blaire Van Valkenburgh 2, Robert K Wayne 16
Affiliations
- PMID: 26234211
- DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.06.060
Free article
Genome-wide Evidence Reveals that African and Eurasian Golden Jackals Are Distinct Species
Klaus-Peter Koepfli et al. Curr Biol. 2015.
Free article
Abstract
The golden jackal of Africa (Canis aureus) has long been considered a conspecific of jackals distributed throughout Eurasia, with the nearest source populations in the Middle East. However, two recent reports found that mitochondrial haplotypes of some African golden jackals aligned more closely to gray wolves (Canis lupus), which is surprising given the absence of gray wolves in Africa and the phenotypic divergence between the two species. Moreover, these results imply the existence of a previously unrecognized phylogenetically distinct species despite a long history of taxonomic work on African canids. To test the distinct-species hypothesis and understand the evolutionary history that would account for this puzzling result, we analyzed extensive genomic data including mitochondrial genome sequences, sequences from 20 autosomal loci (17 introns and 3 exon segments), microsatellite loci, X- and Y-linked zinc-finger protein gene (ZFX and ZFY) sequences, and whole-genome nuclear sequences in African and Eurasian golden jackals and gray wolves. Our results provide consistent and robust evidence that populations of golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia represent distinct monophyletic lineages separated for more than one million years, sufficient to merit formal recognition as different species: C. anthus (African golden wolf) and C. aureus (Eurasian golden jackal). Using morphologic data, we demonstrate a striking morphologic similarity between East African and Eurasian golden jackals, suggesting parallelism, which may have misled taxonomists and likely reflects uniquely intense interspecific competition in the East African carnivore guild. Our study shows how ecology can confound taxonomy if interspecific competition constrains size diversification.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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