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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Enigmatic Falklands ‘fox’ might have hitched a ride with humans

Findings suggest that people lived on the islands earlier than thought — and could have imported the canid called the warrah.
Illustration of a warrah.

The warrah, whose origins piqued Charles Darwin’s curiosity, was hunted into extinction by 1876. Credit: The Natural History Museum/Alamy

When Europeans first reached the Falkland Islands in 1690, they found a fox-like animal now called the warrah. Less than 200 years later, it had been hunted to extinction. But how did it get there in the first place? There has been little evidence that humans lived on the islands, which lie east of southernmost South America, before 1690. Nor is there evidence of an ice bridge that the animals could have crossed from the mainland millennia before.

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Nature 599, 10 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02946-0

References

  1. Hamley, K. M. et al. Sci. Adv. 7, eabh3803 (2021).

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