African wolf

The African wolf is a canine native to North Africa, West Africa, the Sahel, northern East Africa, and the Horn of Africa. It is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List. In the Middle Atlas in Morocco, it was sighted in elevations as high as. It is primarily a predator of invertebrates and mammals as large as gazelle fawns, though larger animals are sometimes taken. Its diet also includes animal carcasses, human refuse, and fruit. They are monogamous and territorial; offspring remain with the parents to assist in raising their parents' younger pups.
The African wolf was previously classified as an African variant of the golden jackal, though a series of analyses on the species' mitochondrial DNA and nuclear genome in 2015 demonstrated that it is a distinct species more closely related to the gray wolf and coyote. It is nonetheless still close enough to the golden jackal to produce hybrid offspring, as indicated through genetic tests on jackals in Israel, and a 19th-century captive crossbreeding experiment. Further studies demonstrated that it is the descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% gray wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry.
It plays a prominent role in some African cultures; it was considered sacred in ancient Egypt, particularly in Lycopolis, where it was venerated as a god. In North African folklore, it is viewed as an untrustworthy animal whose body parts can be used for medicinal or ritualistic purposes, while it is held in high esteem in Senegal's Serer religion as being the first creature to be created by the god Roog.

Names

The taxon is known under the following names: African wolf, African golden wolf, golden wolf, African golden jackal, North African jackal, African jackal, gray jackal, wolf jackal, jackal wolf, Egyptian wolf, Egyptian jackal.
Local and indigenous names:

Linguistic group or area	Indigenous name
Afar	Wucharia
Amazigh	Ouchan asian Ouchan akhatar
Amharic	ተረ ቀበሮ
Arabic	ابن آوى
Fula	???'?? Sundu
Hausa	Kyarkeci
Somali	Yey
Songhai	Nzongo
Swahili Swahili	Bweha wa mbuga Bweha dhahabu
Tuareg	Ebăgg
Tigrinya	ቡኳርያ
Wolof	Tili

Description

The African wolf is intermediate in size between the African jackals and the small subspecies of gray wolves, with both sexes weighing, and standing in height. There is however a high degree of size variation geographically, with Western and Northern African specimens being larger than their East African cousins. It has a relatively long snout and ears, while the tail is comparatively short, measuring in length. Fur color varies individually, seasonally and geographically, though the typical coloration is yellowish to silvery grey, with slightly reddish limbs and black speckling on the tail and shoulders. The throat, abdomen and facial markings are usually white, and the eyes are amber-colored. Females bear two to four pairs of teats. Although superficially similar to the golden jackal, the African wolf has a more pointed muzzle and sharper, more robust teeth. The ears are longer in the African wolf, and the skull has a more elevated forehead.

Sex and Location	Numbers of individuals	Weight	Weight
Males	6	9.0	7 - 10
Females	4	8.1	7 - 10
8 year old melanistic male	1	19	NA
Adults	21	14	13 - 19.7

Various C. lupaster phenotypes, ranging from gracile jackal-like morphs to more robust wolf-like ones.

Taxonomy

Early writings

wrote of wolves living in Egypt, mentioning that they were smaller than the Greek kind. Georg Ebers wrote of the wolf being among the sacred animals of Egypt, describing it as a "smaller variety" of wolf to those of Europe, and noting how the name Lykopolis, the Ancient Egyptian city dedicated to Anubis, means "city of the wolf".
The African wolf was first recognised as being a separate species from the golden jackal by Frédéric Cuvier in 1820, who described it as being a more elegant animal, with a more melodic voice and a less strong odour. The binomial name he chose for it was derived from the Arcadian Anthus family described by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, whose members would draw lots to become werewolves. Eduard Rüppell proposed that the animal was the ancestor of Egyptian sighthounds, and named it Wolfs-hund, while C.H. Smith named it "thoa" or "thous dog".
An attempt was also made in 1821 to hybridise the two species in captivity, resulting in the birth of five pups, three of which died before weaning. The two survivors were noted to never play with each other, and had completely contrasting temperaments: One pup inherited the golden jackal's shyness, while the other was affectionate toward its human captors. English biologist G.J. Mivart emphasized the differences between the African wolf and the golden jackal in his writings:
The canids present in Egypt in particular were noted to be so much more gray wolf-like than populations elsewhere in Africa that W.F. Hemprich and C.G. Ehrenberg gave them the binomial name Canis lupaster in 1832. Likewise, T.H. Huxley, upon noting the similarities between the skulls of lupaster and Indian wolves, classed the animal as a subspecies of the gray wolf. However, the animal was subsequently synonymised with the golden jackal by Ernst Schwarz in 1926.
In 1965, the Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén wrote:
In 1981, zoologist Walter Ferguson argued in favor of lupaster being a subspecies of the gray wolf based on cranial measurements, stating that the classing of the animal as a jackal was based solely on the animal's small size, and predated the discovery of Arabian wolf|, which is intermediate in size between Eurasian wolf| and lupaster.

21st-century discoveries

Further doubts over its being conspecific with the golden jackal of Eurasia arose in December 2002, when a canid was sighted in Eritrea's Danakil Desert whose appearance did not correspond to that of the golden jackal or the six other recognized species of the area, but strongly resembled that of the gray wolf. The area had previously been largely unexplored because of its harsh climate and embroilment in the Eritrean War of Independence and subsequent Eritrean–Ethiopian War, though local Afar tribesmen knew of the animal, and referred to it as wucharia.
The animal's wolf-like qualities were confirmed in 2011, when several golden "jackal" populations in Egypt and the Horn of Africa classed as Canis aureus lupaster were found to have mtDNA sequences more closely resembling those found in gray wolves than those of golden jackals. These wolf-like mtDNA sequences were found to occur over a 6,000 km wide area, encompassing Algeria, Mali and Senegal. Furthermore, the sampled African specimens displayed much more nucleotide and haplotype diversity than that present in Indian and Himalayan wolves, thus indicating a larger ancestral population, and an effective extant population of around 80,000 females. Both these studies proposed reclassifying Canis aureus lupaster as a subspecies of the gray wolf.
In 2015, a more thorough comparative study of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes on a larger sample of wolf-like African canids from northern, eastern and western Africa showed that they were in fact all distinct from the golden jackal, with a genetic divergence of around 6.7%, which is greater than that between gray wolves and coyotes and that between gray wolves and domestic dogs. Furthermore, the study showed that these African wolf-like canids were more closely related to gray wolves and coyotes than to golden jackals, and that C. l. lupaster merely represents a distinct phenotype of the African wolf rather than an actual gray wolf.
It was estimated that the African wolf diverged from the wolf–coyote clade 1.0–1.7 million years ago, during the Pleistocene, and therefore its superficial similarity to the golden jackal would be a case of parallel evolution. Considering its phylogenetic position and the canid fossil record, it is likely that the African wolf evolved from larger ancestors that became progressively more jackal-like in size upon populating Africa on account of interspecific competition with both larger and smaller indigenous carnivores. Traces of African wolf DNA were identified in golden jackals in Israel, which adjoins Egypt, thus indicating the presence of a hybrid zone. The study's findings were corroborated that same year by Spanish, Mexican and Moroccan scientists analyzing the mtDNA of wolves in Morocco, who found that the specimens analyzed were distinct from both golden jackals and gray wolves but bore a closer relationship to the latter. Studies on RAD sequences found instances of African wolves hybridizing with both feral dogs and Ethiopian wolves.
In 2017, it was proposed by scientists at the Oslo and Helsinki Universities that the binomial name C. anthus was a nomen dubium, as Cuvier's 1820 description of the holotype, a female collected from Senegal, seems to be describing the side-striped jackal rather than the actual African wolf, and does not match the appearance of a male specimen described by Cuvier in his later writings. This ambiguity, coupled with the disappearance of the holotype's remains, led to the scientists proposing giving priority to Hemprich and Ehrenberg's name C. lupaster, due to the type specimen having a more detailed and consistent description, and its remains being still examinable at the Museum für Naturkunde. The following year, a major genetic study of Canis species also referred to the African wolf as Canis lupaster.
In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/SSC Canid Specialist Group recommended that because the specimen identified as Canis anthus Cuvier, 1820 was uncertain, the species should be known as Canis lupaster Hemprich and Ehrenberg, 1832 until Canis anthus can be validated.