In a major find, new fossil evidence suggests that the famed Ice Age animal Arctic fox - thought to have been evolved in Europe - 'pre-adapted' to living in the cold and harsh environment on lofty Tibetan terrains before moving to Europe.
The new fossils that researchers unearthed from the Zanda Basin and the Kunlun Pass Basin in the Tibetan Plateau do not match any of the roughly 20 known fox species, and so represent a new species, scientists claimed.
"The new Tibetan species and the Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) show striking similarity in their dental adaptation for extreme meat-eating," said Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California, US.
The specimens were excavated from rocks about 3.6 million to 5.1 million years old.
"They are the first Arctic fox-like fossils to be found from outside the Arctic regions, and they pre-date the oldest records by three to four million years," Wang added.
The team named the new species Vulpes Qiuzhudingi in honour of a prominent palaeontologist Qiu Zhuding.
V Qiuzhudingi's teeth are those of an animal that eats mostly meat and are typical of predators living in extremely cold environments, including polar bears, Arctic foxes and Arctic wolves.
"The scenario seems to be clear that we have an ancestor of Arctic foxes in high Tibet," Wang concluded.
Mikael Fortelius, an evolutionary palaeontologist at the University of Helsinki, said, "The Arctic fox is just one of several iconic Ice Age animals to have their ancestry traced back to the Tibetan Plateau - other examples being the woolly rhino (Coelodonta thibetana) and the snow leopard (Uncia uncia)."
"The study lends strong support to the 'out of Tibet' hypothesis, which proposes that animals adapted to a cold, snowy climate in Tibet then spread to other parts of the world as their habitats expanded during ice ages," Fortelius added.
The study appeared in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
