Atapuerca fossils reveal how wolves evolved in the Iberian Peninsula over more than one million years

A study with extensive participation from IPHES-CERCA researchers has reconstructed a key chapter in the evolutionary history of wolves in the Iberian Peninsula. Published in The Anatomical Record, the research examines the evolution of Canis mosbachensis, an extinct species regarded as an ancestor of modern wolves, based on fossils recovered from the sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain).

The study was led by researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and includes contributions from IPHES-CERCA researchers Palmira Saladié, Rosa Huguet, Andreu Ollé, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo and Isabel Cáceres, together with specialists from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Universitat Rovira i Virgili and the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH).

The research focuses on the analysis of canid dental remains recovered over the last twenty-five years from the Atapuerca sites. The fossils belong to individuals that lived between just over one million years ago and approximately 400,000 years ago, a period spanning part of the Early and Middle Pleistocene.

The research team studied 108 dental remains from different levels of the Trinchera del Ferrocarril at Atapuerca and compared them with a sample of 87 modern and fossil Iberian wolves. This comparison made it possible to identify gradual changes in body size, dental morphology and feeding strategies through time.

The results show that Canis mosbachensis maintained a remarkably stable body size for hundreds of thousands of years, consistently smaller than that of modern wolves. The oldest specimens display primitive characteristics, particularly evident in the dentition associated with cutting and processing meat.

In contrast, the most recent specimens show an increase in body size and a series of anatomical features that progressively bring them closer to modern wolves. Among these changes is the elongation of the cutting region of the lower carnassial tooth, a modification that suggests greater efficiency in meat processing and a gradual shift towards a more carnivorous diet.

According to the study’s conclusions, these changes represent an intermediate stage in the evolutionary process that eventually gave rise to Canis lupus, the species that includes modern wolves. The Atapuerca fossils therefore document a crucial phase in the transition between ancestral forms and the large predators that currently inhabit ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere.

IPHES-CERCA’s participation in this research is part of the work carried out by the centre at the Sierra de Atapuerca sites, one of the world’s most important archaeological and palaeontological sequences for understanding human evolution, Pleistocene ecosystems and the communities of large mammals that inhabited them.

The article provides new evidence on the origin and evolution of European wolves and highlights the exceptional value of the Atapuerca sites for reconstructing the evolutionary history of Pleistocene fauna.

Reference:

Blázquez-Orta, R., Saladié, P., Huguet, R., Ollé, A., Rodríguez-Hidalgo, A., Rodríguez-Álvarez, X. P., Cáceres, I., García-Medrano, P., Santos, E., Martinón-Torres, M., Álvarez-Alonso, D., de Andrés-Herrero, M., & García, N. (2026). From Canis mosbachensis to modern wolves: Canid evolutionary insights from the Early and Middle Pleistocene of Atapuerca (Spain). The Anatomical Record, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70219