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.

中文翻译：

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来自欧洲的亚洲野犬 (Cuon alpinus) 的古代 DNA

亚洲野狗 ( Cuon alpinus），今天主要限于南亚和东南亚，在整个欧亚大陆广泛传播，甚至在更新世期间到达北美。像许多其他物种一样，它在更新世末期遭受了巨大的范围损失，并且在以前的大部分分布中都灭绝了。dhole 的化石记录是分散的，并且由于 dhole 与其他犬科动物的大小重叠和形态相似性高，化石的鉴定可能会变得复杂。我们为来自欧洲的 6 个假定的 dhole 化石生成了几乎完整的线粒体基因组。通过使用三行证据，即映射到各种犬类线粒体基因组的读数数量、沿参考基因组的映射均匀度的评估和量化以及系统发育分析，我们能够将六个样本中的两个确定为 dhole，而四个样本代表狼化石。这突出了遗传数据在试图确定化石标本的物种隶属关系时可以做出的贡献。与现代 dhole 序列相比，古代 dhole 序列差异很大，但用于比较的 dhole 数据的稀缺阻碍了更广泛的分析。