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Foreststalker

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Description

This picture was drawn for the Allocene project and shows one of the descendents of the modern day Australian wild dog.
I had this idea due to three reasons:
1) the existence of striped wild dogs in Australia (according to Corbett about 3 % of the population)
2) the build of extinct predators like bear dogs, hyaenadon and the thylacine
3) DNA results suggesting that North American Gray wolves had benefited from mating with domestic dogs (the black color)

Unlike its modern day ancestors the forest stalker is an ambush predator and build more like a cat rather than a dog. As the name suggests it lives and hunts in forests where it's stripes (a trait seemingly brought to Australia by non-dingo dogs and in this scenario passed on over millions of years) are providing camouflage similar to modern day tigers.
Of course the existence of the stalkers heavily depends on whether their ancestors get decimated or not by the humans who want to "save" the "pure" dingo. Sure in theory stripes could be developed nonetheless if lets say these people manage to kill all dogs they see as unfit to live in the Australian wilderness but the chances are much lower for two reasons:
1) Mutations are unpredictable
2) the "surviving" and "pure" dingoes would come from a much smaller founding population and therefore chances of inbreeding depression as well as death due to disease are much more likely (not to mention that about 4000 years of evolution would be for naught since the founding population of the first dingoes seem to have been through a genetic bottleneck already)
Image size
1894x1000px 160.59 KB
Make
Eastman Kodak Company
Date Taken
Mar 4, 2012, 11:36:22 AM
© 2012 - 2024 Asanbonsam
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caspion161's avatar
cool it looks a little like the thylacinus potens