Re:'Wolf-like' creature shot on Montana ranch puzzles experts
by Mbioguy on Friday May 25, 2018 @04:45PM
(#17157795)
Canids are pretty much a superspecies anyways.
Consider brown bears and polar bears. We consider them 2 species yet they can successfully interbreed. The main reason they don't is that their ranges haven't historically overlapped. Geography, not biology, was the separator. You could view them as one species with a bivariate distribution, in the late stages of diverging into two.
Canids likewise viewed as one species with significant ecological clustering, but divided this time by behavior.
Consider brown bears and polar bears. We consider them 2 species yet they can successfully interbreed. The main reason they don't is that their ranges haven't historically overlapped. Geography, not biology, was the separator. You could view them as one species with a bivariate distribution, in the late stages of diverging into two.
Canids likewise viewed as one species with significant ecological clustering, but divided this time by behavior.