Ancient DNA from the Asiatic Wild Dog (Cuon alpinus) from Europe

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  • Ulrike H. Taron
    University of Potsdam
  • Johanna Paijmans
    University of Potsdam
  • Axel Barlow
    University of Potsdam
  • Michaela Preick
    University of Potsdam
  • Arati Lyengar
    University at Albany, USA
  • Virgil Dragusin
    Romanian Academy
  • Stefan Vasile
    University of Bucharest
  • Adrian Marciszak
    University of Wrocław
  • Martina Roblickova
    Anthropos Institute, Czech Republic
  • Michael Hofreiter
    University of Potsdam
The Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus), restricted today largely to South and Southeast Asia, was widespread throughout Eurasia and even reached North America during the Pleistocene. Like many other species, it suffered from a huge range loss towards the end of the Pleistocene and went extinct in most of its former distribution. The fossil record of the dhole is scattered and the identification of fossils can be complicated by an overlap in size and a high morphological similarity between dholes and other canid species. We generated almost complete mitochondrial genomes for six putative dhole fossils from Europe. By using three lines of evidence, i.e., the number of reads mapping to various canid mitochondrial genomes, the evaluation and quantification of the mapping evenness along the reference genomes and phylogenetic analysis, we were able to identify two out of six samples as dhole, whereas four samples represent wolf fossils. This highlights the contribution genetic data can make when trying to identify the species affiliation of fossil specimens. The ancient dhole sequences are highly divergent when compared to modern dhole sequences, but the scarcity of dhole data for comparison impedes a more extensive analysis.
Original languageEnglish
JournalGenes
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Jan 2021
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