Durham, NC — Coyotes today are pint-sized compared to their Ice
Age counterparts, finds a new fossil study. Between 11,500 and
10,000 years ago — a mere blink of an eye in geologic terms —
coyotes shrunk to their present size. The sudden shrinkage was
most likely a response to dwindling food supply and changing
interactions with competitors, rather than warming climate,
researchers say. In a paper appearing this week in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers studied museum
collections of coyote skeletons dating from 38,000 years ago to
the present day. It turns out that between 11,500 and 10,000
years ago, at the end of a period called the Pleistocene,
coyotes in North America suddenly got smaller. "Pleistocene
coyotes probably weighed between 15-25 kilograms, and overlapped
in size with wolves. But today the upper limit of a coyote is
only around 10-18 kilograms," said co-author Julie Meachen of
the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North
Carolina. "Within just over a th