BRENT: For 150 years, biologists took it for granted that golden jackals in Africa were, in fact, golden jackals — closely related to other golden jackals originating from Eurasia.
It made sense. The animals were about the same size and looked a lot alike. But it turns out to have been a case of mistaken identity: A new DNA analysis shows that the African “jackals” are in fact more closely related to a sort of wolf than they are to the Eurasian golden jackals.
The discovery, conducted by an international team of researchers and published last week in the journal Current Biology, shows that DNA can provide definitive answers when the eyes deceive, said UCLA evolutionary biologist Robert Wayne, one of the study coauthors.
“That’s what DNA lets us do,” he said. “It lets you uncover the past.”
Wayne first studied the purported African golden jackals 25 years ago.
“What had always fascinated us was that there were species that had such huge distributions,” he said. The golden jackal was one such beast. Its habitat extended from East Africa to North Africa and into Eurasia.
Wayne and his colleagues at that time had wondered how the golden jackal was able to thrive so widely and not be crowded out by competition. In North America, where the animal does not exist, “you have wolves and coyotes and that’s it,” he said. “There’s no room for anything else.”
So he traveled to East Africa to investigate, collecting data that suggested that the canids in Africa, including the “jackals,” had managed to divide up resources by adopting different hunting and foraging patterns.
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