I asked Ronald Nowak if he knew where the red wolf fossil found in Fern Cave, Jackson County, Alabama was. (Ronald Nowak is one of the world’s foremost authorities on recent canine evolution and morphology.) He did. He said it’s located in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. It is specimen #348063, and it is in the mammalogy collection, not the paleontology collection because it appears to be 100-200 years old. Although Pleistocene-aged fossils were found in Fern Cave, the wolf skeleton doesn’t look as old as the others.
He agrees this specimen would help clarify the red wolf’s status as a species. It’s a complete skeleton including the skull. It even has a thin layer of nonskeletel material (skin?), but not fur as I originally assumed. He wrote that for years he’s been trying to get molecular biologists interested in this specimen, but so far they have ignored it. Hopefully, some day they’ll analyze it. There should be plenty of mtDNA and material for carbon dating.
March 12, 2013 at 2:13 pm |
Mark, do you know if anyone ever tested #348063?
March 12, 2013 at 7:23 pm |
I’m pretty sure the geneticists have still ignored that specimen.
Funny, I was just thinking about nagging Robert Wayne about this a few days ago, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. He’s the lead author of a genome wide study of canis.