National Geographic blogger Ed Yong has written a highly readable account of a paper in Nature about Darwin's dog—not the great naturalist's pet, but a strange doglike animal found by the first visitors to the remote Falkland Islands, off southern Argentina. The Falklands wolf, Dusicyon australis, was slaughtered to extinction in the 1800s, but Charles Darwin collected a specimen during HMS Challenger's visit in 1834. Now DNA from museum specimens have shown that D. australis shared ancestors with a mainland South American cousin, the equally extinct D. avus, just 16,300 years ago. It walked to the Falklands during a time in the ice age when the sea was exceptionally low, making it a newly documented example of land-bridge dispersal.
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