PARIS: Scientists recently identified a new wolf species in Africa. It seems that the golden jackal in Africa could be a genetically separate species from the European golden jackals.
A recent report conducted by international researchers from Russia, the United States and other countries examined the microsatellite, mitochondrial and genomic sequence information in order to compare the two species of golden jackals. After they did this, the scientists compared the two species to gray wolves in order to find out if the African golden jackal is a different species.
A conservation and evolutionary geneticist from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute from Washington, Klaus-Peter Koepfli said that their results revealed that the Eurasian and African golden jackals are different regarding every genetic marker they tested, including information gathered from whole genomes, which suggests that the species are evolving lineages independently.
Koepfli said that this is the first discovery of a brand new species of canid in Africa in more than 150 years. Koepfli also said that one of the main reveals of the study is that there is a possibility to discover covered biodiversity even amongst very widespread and well-known species like the golden jackal. These kinds of discoveries are even more possible by analyzing information from whole genomes. The data they have regarding nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA phylogenies are different, but they are reliable in revealing that the two lineages from those two golden jackals are certainly not each other’s relatives.
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