''Lycaon sekowei'' is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

canid Canidae (; from Latin, ''canis'', "dog") is a family (biology), biological family of caniform carnivorans, constituting a clade. A member of this family is also called a canid (). The family includes three subfamily, subfamilies: the Caninae, a ...

species from southern

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

that lived during the early

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( ; referred to colloquially as the ''ice age, Ice Age'') is the geological epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fin ...

epoch, dating from 2 to 1 million years ago. Hartstone-Rose and colleagues claimed that ''L. sekowei'' was a

hypercarnivore A hypercarnivore is an animal that has a diet that is more than 70% meat, either via active predation or by scavenging. The remaining non-meat diet may consist of non-animal foods such as fungi, fruits or other plant material. Some extant exampl ...

just like the modern African wild dog (''L. pictus''), though its front paws were not as specialized for running. They also proposed that ''L. sekowei'' was the ancestor of the wild-dog lineage based on dental morphology similar to that of ''L. pictus'' and the European '' Lycaon''-like canids. In 2013, however, Madurell-Malapeira and colleagues considered the hypothesis that the genus ''Lycaon'' may have originated from Eurasia and dispersed into Africa by 2 million years ago would be more likely, given the substantial variability of dental characters and the relatively scarce African record of ''Lycaon''-like canids.

References

Prehistoric canines Pliocene carnivorans Pleistocene carnivorans Pliocene mammals of Africa Pleistocene mammals of Africa Fossil taxa described in 2010 {{canid-stub