The coywolf has evolved in the last ~100 years.
It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America
2022-06-02: Evolution seems to be faster, perhaps in general, than expected.
The study is the first time the speed of evolution has been systematically evaluated on a large scale, rather than on an ad hoc basis. The team used studies of 19 populations of wild animals from around the world. These included superb fairy-wrens in Australia, spotted hyenas in Tanzania, song sparrows in Canada and red deer in Scotland.
“The method gives us a way to measure the potential speed of current evolution in response to natural selection across all traits in a population. This is something we have not been able to do with previous methods, so being able to see so much potential change came as a surprise to the team. Whether species are adapting faster than before, we don’t know, because we don’t have a baseline. We just know that the recent potential, the amount of ‘fuel’, has been higher than expected, but not necessarily higher than before. Evolution cannot be discounted as a process which allows species to persist in response to environmental change.”