A mitogenomic view on ancient intercontinental dispersal in gray wolves (Canis lupus)

• Main Authors: Koblmüller, Stephan, Vilà, Carles, Lorente-Galdós, Belén, Dabad, Marc, Ramírez, Óscar, Marqués-Bonet, Tomàs, Wayne, Robert K., Leonard, Jennifer A.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Canis lupus
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/153945

Trabajo presentado en la Annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE 2015), celebrado en Viena del 12 al 16 de julio de 2015. Gray wolves (Canis lupus) have a very wide native distribution across the entire Holarctic. The fossil record indicates that the species evolved in Eurasia in the early Pleistocene, and then colonized North America in the mid Pleistocene. Previous phylogeographic studies found polyphyly of North American wolves within the diversity of Eurasian wolves with mitochondrial markers, but the support on deep branches was low and genomic data has suggested monophyly of the North American wolves. Here we analyze 105 whole mitochondrial genomes from the main clade of gray wolves within an approximate Bayesian computation framework to test for the number of times wolves colonized North America from Eurasia, and date colonization(s). We find that the mitogenomes of all living wolves in North America, including Mexican wolves, derive from a single colonization event from Eurasia that expanded its range into southern North America before the Cordillerian and Laurentide ice sheets fused in the Last Glacial Maximum, approximately 23KYA. This is more recent than expected based on the fossil record, suggesting that there were earlier colonizations that left no descendents. No