I was curious about the genetic relationships of Carnivores. Clearly, there are several related species - the big branches being wolves, cats, foxes branching early off the wolf line, some other carnivores, etc.
But when did these start to differentiate? What is the last common ancestor of these species? What is the last common ancestor with humans?
Seems the Order Carnivora is the start of your link to the earliest common ancestor of canines and felines. Apparently Family Canidae (which encompasses all of your dog-like animals) diverged early on from other carnivores branching away some 50-60 million years ago. Not sure what their common ancestor looked like (my Google-Fu fails me for some reason on this).
To wrap humans in you need to go even further back to, near as I can tell, the common ancestor for all mammals which seems to be a small, shrew-like animal some 80 million years ago living in Asia (cite ).
Not sure but the best I can tell is perhaps Therapsids are the common ancestor to the order carnivora. Take that with a grain of salt.
Well, yeah, but only in the sense that they’re the common ancestor to all mammals, from platypus to muskox.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Carnivora, including some fairly recent reassignments on ancestry within the order. There’s a couple of things I consider suspect in Wiki’s account of their taxonomy, but I’ll take a raincheck and see what someone more familiar with carnivore taxonomy has to say.
Key info you probably wanted, from the article:
Placental mammals, assuming that 2004 article is still accurate.
But yeah, the primates and the carnivores don’t share a common ancestor until you go pretty far back into the family tree of placentals. We’re more closely related to rodents.