An American Lion

An illustration of the Falklands wolf from The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, which was published in the late 1830s.

Did someone bring the now-extinct Falklands wolf to those islands or did it evolve there?

The Falklands wolf has puzzled evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin first encountered it during the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s. It was the only native land mammal on the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off the coast of Argentina. No one knew how it got there or what mainland animals it was descended from — and it did not help that the wolf was hunted to extinction by 1876.

But using genetic analysis, Graham J. Slater, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have solved some of the mystery. The closest living relative of the Falklands wolf, they write in Current Biology, is a South American species, but the two diverged in North America.

The researchers obtained snippets of DNA from five museum specimens, looked at variations among the samples and compared them with DNA from living species. They were able to build a family tree and a timeline of when the various branches diverged.

Earlier studies of the Falklands wolf had suggested it was related to foxes, but the DNA work showed the closest living relative to be another South American canid, the maned wolf.

The remote location of the islands would suggest that the ancestors of the Falklands wolf crossed on an ice bridge or floated there on a huge chunk of vegetation—sort of a Voyage of the Kon-Tikiversion of spreading around an animal species. Things like this stick in the craw of anyone who doesn’t have an open mind about natural selection or evolution. How the devil can I take you seriously if you deny the facts about the Falklands wolf?

I’m a firm believer that we shouldn’t mess with Nature. There’s also another article here…