Revisiting the Woolly wolf (Canis lupus chanco) phylogeny in Himalaya: Addressing taxonomy, spatial extent and distribution of an ancient lineage in Asia.

ABSTRACT: Of the sub-species of Holarctic wolf, the Woolly wolf (Canis lupus chanco) is uniquely adapted to atmospheric hypoxia and widely distributed across the Himalaya, Qinghai Tibetan Plateau (QTP) and Mongolia. Taxonomic ambiguity still exists for this sub-species because of complex evolutionary history anduse of limited wild samples across its range in Himalaya. We document for the first time population genetic structure and taxonomic affinity of the wolves across western and eastern Himalayan regions from samples collected from the wild (n = 19) using mitochondrial control region (225bp). We found two haplotypes in our data, one widely distributed in the Himalaya that was shared with QTP and the other confined to Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the western Himalaya, India. After combining

SUBMITTER: Joshi B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7162449 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature