Talk:Evolution of the wolf

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 January 2020 and 11 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lilywestphal1.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

New article - Evolution of the wolf
Hello All, this article is the result of a WP:SPINOFF from the Subspecies of Canis lupus article, and its history can be found at Talk:Subspecies of Canis lupus. The article's scope will initially give greater weight to the Late Pleistocene wolf populations (taxonomic status:not yet assessed) over the past 50,000 years, of which some are thought to be the ancestors of the extant Gray wolf, however this should not deter editors from progressing other time periods if this is their interest. It is not intended for this article to progress past the Late Pleistocene-Holocene boundary and into the extant subspecies of C. lupus, and this article's watchers and visitors will ensure that there will be no WP:content forking developed away from the content of the extant Gray wolf article. It is envisaged that this article ends where Subspecies of Canis lupus and Gray wolf begin. Regards, William Harris  •   talk •   11:08, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Wolf Event
I think the Wolf event should have its own article, like the Cat gap. 93.70.58.209 (talk) 08:47, 30 May 2018 (UTC)


 * It would be an interesting addition to Wikipedia, and I encourage you to do just that! (It could be your first, short article. If you would like some assistance to get started, drop in on my Talk page.) William Harris •   (talk) •  09:46, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Gopalakrishnan, 2018
''Gopalakrishnan et al. present evidence of pervasive gene flow among species of the genus Canis. In addition to previously known admixture events, they find evidence of gene flow from a ‘‘ghost’’ canid, related to the dhole, into the ancestor of the gray wolf and coyote. Further, they suggest that the African golden wolf is a species of hybrid origin.''

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0960-9822(18)31125-4&fbclid=IwAR36kxEV6ydBHt6wQ18ur2BhT0qwzEdhrpGQoYJJLbRHoYpEZcBwNO_W2R4 Mariomassone (talk) 17:45, 22 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Good work, M, I see our friend Koepfli is in the thick of it again, along with some other solid names, and the genomic extraction is of high quality. - "We furthermore argue that the common ancestor of gray wolves and coyotes differentiated from the lineage leading to golden jackals, in part by admixing with a dhole-like canid. Finally, the robust signal of gene flow observed between African hunting dogs and dholes testifies to an as-yet-undiscovered prehistoric overlap between the two lineages."
 * We also have this in the pipeline here - it does not say much but the data will be used as input for something else. It will be interesting to see what comes out next. For now, I intend on staying with the current phylotree (which has multiple sourcing behind it) and see how this new finding develops. We will review it in the new year. William Harris •   (talk) •  08:06, 23 October 2018 (UTC)


 * I have provided a much-reduced and simplified cladogram based on Gopalakrishnan 2018. Another team has recently examined museum specimens from southeastern China dating back to the 1970s and has "rediscovered" a wolf whose genome is 18% the unknown canid - more when it is finally published. William Harris •   (talk) •  01:54, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Common ancestor with coyote
Some new studies have put the grey wolf-coyote common ancestor around 50000 years ago. Would that make both species evolutionary histories go back only tens of thousands of years and not hundreds of thousands of years as written in this article? Should this article be updated to account for this new information? 24.150.136.254 (talk) 21:44, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Which papers are those?--Mr Fink (talk) 22:43, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Here is one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/07/29/it-turns-out-the-united-states-has-just-one-true-species-of-wolf/ 24.150.136.254 (talk) 20:46, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Regardless of how a Washington Post journalist misinterprets the research, what did the research paper itself say? 14.2.205.177 (talk) 06:27, 23 January 2024 (UTC)