Golden jackals in Africa and Eurasia look much alike, and taxonomists long treated them as a single wide-ranging species. Mitochondrial and then nuclear genomic comparisons undermined that. The African populations proved to be more closely related to grey wolves and coyotes than to Eurasian golden jackals, with a deep divergence between the two groups.
The consequence was a formal split. The African animals were recognised as Canis lupaster, the African wolf, and Canis aureus was restricted to Eurasia. The change removed a supposed intercontinental range and rewrote the distribution maps in field guides published before it.
Meanwhile the Eurasian species is doing something conspicuous of its own: it has spread markedly north and west across Europe since the late twentieth century, with confirmed records well beyond its historical range, including animals reaching the Baltic and north-western Europe. The drivers are debated, with wolf scarcity, land-use change and mild winters all proposed, and no single explanation established.