Falklands Wolf First Appeared in North America, Researchers Say

According to Henry Fountain, the Falklands wolf has puzzled evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin. They knew that it was the only native land mammal on the Falkland Islands, located 300 miles off the cost of Argentina, but nobody knew how it got there or what mainland animal it was descended from. By using genetic analysis, Graham J. Slater, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angels, and colleagues came to a conclusion and partly answered the question of how the wolves got to the Falklands. They could not have been brought to the islands by ancient peoples because the most recent common ancestor of the five samples studies lived at least 70,000 years ago, long before humans arrived. Instead, he said, the wolves must have floated over on vegetation or ice floes.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/10obwolf.html?ref=science