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. 2018 Jan;14(1):20170613.
doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0613.

Postcranial diversity and recent ecomorphic impoverishment of North American gray wolves

Susumu Tomiya  1   2   3 , Julie A Meachen  4
Affiliations

Postcranial diversity and recent ecomorphic impoverishment of North American gray wolves

Susumu Tomiya et al. Biol Lett. 2018 Jan.

Erratum in

Abstract

Recent advances in genomics and palaeontology have begun to unravel the complex evolutionary history of the gray wolf, Canis lupus Still, much of their phenotypic variation across time and space remains to be documented. We examined the limb morphology of the fossil and modern North American gray wolves from the late Quaternary (<ca 70 ka) to better understand their postcranial diversity through time. We found that the late-Pleistocene gray wolves were characterized by short-leggedness on both sides of the Cordilleran-Laurentide ice sheets, and that this trait survived well into the Holocene despite the collapse of Pleistocene megafauna and disappearance of the 'Beringian wolf' from Alaska. By contrast, extant populations in the Midwestern USA and northwestern North America are distinguished by their elongate limbs with long distal segments, which appear to have evolved during the Holocene possibly in response to a new level or type of prey depletion. One of the consequences of recent extirpation of the Plains (Canis lupus nubilus) and Mexican wolves (C. l. baileyi) from much of the USA is an unprecedented loss of postcranial diversity through removal of short-legged forms. Conservation of these wolves is thus critical to restoration of the ecophenotypic diversity and evolutionary potential of gray wolves in North America.

Keywords: Canis lupus; Quaternary; postcrania.

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Conflict of interest statement

We have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Morphometric differentiation of wolf samples along the first two discriminant axes (LD1 and LD2) for humerus (a), ulna (b), femur (c), and tibia (d). See table 1 for variables. Top row: training data set (dire wolf, brown; Alaskan Beringian wolf, orange; modern gray wolf, blue) and vectors representing proportional variable loadings (see table 1). Rows 2–3: fossil gray wolf samples from late-Pleistocene natural trap cave (NTC, triangles) and Rancho La Brea (RLB, diamonds), and Holocene of Idaho (HID, squares); fill colours indicate group assignments by classification functions. Row 4: Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi; crossed circles) and recent-historical specimens collected before 1900 in areas from which wolves were subsequently extirpated (primarily Plains wolf, C. l. nubilus; stars). Bar charts (e–h) show posterior probabilities of group assignments for individual specimens and correspond to elements in a–d. See table 1 for variables.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Regression lines from ANCOVA of humeral (a), femoral (b) and tibial (c) lengths, with midshaft widths as covariates. Symbols as in figure 1. See table 1 for variables. Colours and lines correspond to groups of samples for best-supported models (electronic supplementary material, table S4): Pleistocene (white/black), non-modern Holocene (including recent historical; pink), Natural Trap Cave + Rancho La Brea (green), and Alaskan Beringian + non-modern Holocene (purple). The dire wolf, Mexican wolf, and USNM A977 (grey star) were excluded from analysis but plotted for comparison. HMLD, humerus midshaft width.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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