Falkland fox
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Falkland fox ( Dusicyon australis ) |
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The Falkland Fox ( Dusicyon australis ) is an extinct wild dog that was native to the Falkland Islands only . The last known Falkland Fox was shot in 1876.
Story of the fox
Occasionally the Falkland Fox is also known under the name "Falkland Wolf", but this is exaggerated in view of its size: it had a head-torso length of around 90 centimeters, with an additional 30 centimeters of tail. Its fur was brown on top, partly with red shades as well as with isolated white hair tips, while the underside was covered with light brown hair.
On the Falkland Islands, this animal was at the end of the food chain (so-called top predator ). It was the only native land mammal before humans arrived. His diet was probably ground-nesting birds and penguins, perhaps also vegetable food. When Charles Darwin headed for the sparsely populated Falkland Islands in 1833, he saw the Falkland fox as a common and tame animal. He reported that the foxes came to the tents to look for food and to eat out of hand. With the mass introduction of sheep breeding , the fox was seen as a threat and released for shooting. From 1839 the British administration paid a premium for every Falkland fox shot. Whether the species actually posed a threat to the sheep cannot be determined today, but it can be doubted. Since there are no forests in the Falkland Islands and the Falkland foxes were so tame, extinction proved easy. 43 years after Darwin's visit, the Falkland Islands' only native land mammal was extinct.
The differences between the falconry foxes on the eastern and western main islands gave Darwin the first indications that species can develop differently.
With Dusicyon avus , a similar dog species was widespread in pre-Columbian times on Tierra del Fuego and the South American mainland. Dusicyon avus died out about 3000 years ago on Tierra del Fuego and about 1600 years ago on the mainland. This species reached a body weight of about 10-15 kg.
The assignment of Dusicyon cultridens from the late Pliocene of Argentina is unclear . The fossil was partly assigned to the genera Canis or Pseudalopex (syn. Lycalopex ).
origin
The ancestry of the Falkland Fox has long been a mystery. There was no previous land connection between the mainland and the islands, there were no native land mammals, and there are no related species on other islands around the Falkland Islands. Speculation that the fox had been brought to the island as a kind of pet by South American indigenous peoples seemed unlikely, there was no relative in Latin America. DNA analyzes revealed that the closest relative was over 300,000 years old. Settlement over an ice bridge also seemed unusual, as the fox would hardly have survived the last ice age on the islands. The closest relative of the Falkland fox living today is the Maned Wolf ( Chrysocyon brachyurus ), from which Dusicyon separated about 7 million years ago. An even closer, but extinct, relative is Dusicyon avus , who lived on the South American mainland and from which the Falkland Fox separated only 16,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age and colonized the Falkland Islands. The fox could run over submarine terraces, which became islands during the Ice Age and which were only separated from one another by narrow and often frozen waterways, and feed on seals or penguins on the way.
additional
The animal is the namesake for the Fox Bay settlement on the West Falkland Islands .
Web links
- Dusicyon australis in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2009. Posted by: IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group, 2008. Accessed November 7 in 2009.
- messybeast.com, three images contains (English)
- Antje Findeklee: Icy Bridge for the Falkland Wolf , from Spektrum.de from March 5, 2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ronald M. Nowak: Walker's Mammals of the World. Volume 1. 6th edition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD et al. 1999, p. 650, ISBN 0-8018-5789-9 .
- ↑ FAZ No. 256 of November 4, 2009, page N 1.
- ^ F. Prevosti, F. Santiago, u. a .: Constraining the time of extinction of the South American fox Dusicyon avus (Carnivora, Canidae) during the late Holocene. In: Quaternary International. 245, 2011, pp. 209-217, doi: 10.1016 / j.quaint.2011.02.010 .
- ↑ Soibelzon, LH, Ceniz, MM, Prevosti, FJ, Soibelzon, E. Y Tartarini, VB: Dos nuevos registros de Dusicyon Hamilton-Smith, 1839 (Canidae, Mammalia) en el Plioceno y Pleistoceno de la región Pampeana (Argentina). Aspectos sistemáticos, tafonómicos, y bioestratigráficos , Congreso Uruguayo de Geología, Montevideo 2007.
- ↑ Ramirez, MA, Prevosti, FJ: " Systematic revision of " Canis "ensenadensis Ameghino, 1888 (Carnivora, Canidae) and the description of a new specimen from the Pleistocene of Argentina ", Ameghiniana 2014, Vol. 51 (1), p 37-51.
- ↑ AL Cione, EP Tonni, L. Soibelzon: The Broken Zig-Zag: Late Cenozoic large mammal and tortoise extinction in South America Archived from the original on February 21, 2016. Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Rev. Mus. Argentino Cienc. Nat., Ns . 5, No. 1, 2003, ISSN 1514-5158 , pp. 1-19. Retrieved May 5, 2012. see figure 3
- ↑ Steve Connor: How scientists cracked puzzle of the Falklands wolf . In: The Independent , Mercopress, November 3, 2009. Retrieved September 1, 2011.
- ↑ Clutton-Brock, J., Corbet, GG, and Hills, M. (1976). Bull. Brit. Mus. Nat. Hist. 29, 119-199. Quoted: GJ Slater, O. Thalmann u. a .: Evolutionary history of the Falklands wolf. In: Current Biology. 19, 2009, pp. R937-R938, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2009.09.018 .
- ↑ GJ Slater, O. Thalmann u. a .: Evolutionary history of the Falklands wolf. In: Current Biology. 19, 2009, pp. R937-R938, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2009.09.018 .
- ^ A. Berta: Origin, diversification, and zoogeography of the South American Canidae . In: Fieldiana: Zoology. 1987, No. 39, pp. 455-471. Digitized in the Internet Archive
- ↑ JJ Austin, J. Soubrier, FJ Prevosti, L. Prates, V. Trejo, F. Mena, A. Cooper: The origins of the enigmatic Falkland Islands wolf. In: Nature Communications . Volume 4, March 2013, p. 1552, ISSN 2041-1723 . doi: 10.1038 / ncomms2570 . PMID 23462995 .
- ↑ sciencemag.org ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from March 5, 2013: Wolf Crossed the Frozen Sea to Get to the Falklands.
