Bush dog and other canids

The diminutive bush dog living in a large portion of South America is currently the closest living relative of the maned wolf. It's webbed feet allow it to hunt large rodents like pacas and capybaras both in thick underbrush and rivers.

The connection between the two canids has been discovered only recently because, well, morphologically they couldn't be more distinct. The maned wolf is thought to be the only extant large canid that survived the pleistocene extinction in South America.

It is also not a wolf and neither is it a fox. The closest relative in human times would have been the Falkland Islands wolf (also not a wolf), but they have been extinct for a long while.

The elusive omnivorous South American short-eared dog looks deceptively similar to bush dog, but it's thought to be an example of convergent evolution, as the two are only distantly related.

In fact the entire genus of South American foxes is more closely related to coyotes than true foxes and only superficially resembles them.

So south American foxes are not foxes, and the maned wolf is not a wolf. Common names suck but scientific nomenclature is too cumbersome to use in casual setting.

Next I may post about the mata-mata cause they had it long time coming.