TY - JOUR

T1 - Ancient DNA from the Asiatic Wild Dog (Cuon alpinus) from Europe

AU - Taron, Ulrike H.

AU - Paijmans, Johanna

AU - Barlow, Axel

AU - Preick, Michaela

AU - Lyengar, Arati

AU - Dragusin, Virgil

AU - Vasile, Stefan

AU - Marciszak, Adrian

AU - Roblickova, Martina

AU - Hofreiter, Michael

PY - 2021/1/22

Y1 - 2021/1/22

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

U2 - 10.3390/genes12020144

DO - 10.3390/genes12020144

M3 - Article

JO - Genes

JF - Genes

SN - 2073-4425

ER -