Have you ever heard of coywolves ? It is a supposed new species, a mixture of coyote and wolf , which in the US media has begun to have a notorious visibility.
And it is true that in North America there is a hybrid type of coyote and wolf that in the last century has spread throughout the forests of the region, but there are doubts about whether it is, indeed, a new species. If anything, it could be a new type of coyote , but not a genuine species. Not a “coywolf”.
Genetic tests suggest that these types of coyotes are actually a mixture of three species: coyote, wolf, and dog . Northeast coyotes are mostly (between 60% and 84% of their genetic load) coyotes, with smaller numbers of wolf (between 8% and 25%) and dog (between 8% and 11%) . As they begin to move south or east, this mix slowly changes: 85% coyote, 2% wolf, and 13% dog in the Virginia area and 91% coyote, 4% wolf, and 5% dog. in the southernmost regions. But in none of the cases was it seen that there was a specimen that only had a mixture of coyote and wolf.
In addition, although the mixture exists, these animals do not reproduce with each other at present , although biologically speaking they are similar enough that the crossing could occur. In fact, the DNA of coyotes shows that a century ago they mated with wolves – at that time the wolf population was low and they were related to coyotes – and half a century ago, with dogs.
In spite of everything, hybridization between species is a natural evolutionary phenomenon . Zoologists no longer distinguish species from each other based on the ability or inability to reproduce. Even modern humans are a hybrid species, with traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes mixed into our genome. The first requirement for evolution is that there is variation and the mixture of genes from two different species gives rise to all kinds of new variations so that evolution does not stagnate.
