‘Warrah’ mystery solved at last

THE Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, visited the Falkland Islands in 1834.

There, the great naturalist encountered ‘the world’s loneliest animal’, the ‘warrah’. This member of the dog family, also known as the Antarctic wolf, was the sole land-mammal species on the islands which are 460km from the South American mainland. No dog could swim that far, so how did this wolf’s ancestors get there and why were they the only ones to do so? These questions, which intrigued Darwin, have remained a puzzle ever since.

Now, researchers at the University of Adelaide think they have answers; their findings appear in the current edition of the journal Nature Communications.