: We already knew the Halo 4 Jackals were supposed to be a different
: subspecies. This isn't new news. But anyone with a basic knowledge of
: evolution and comparative anatomy know that that's a BS explanation, and
: we all know that it was simply 343I's art department making artistic
: changes for the sake of change. I already wrote a long post about this
: topic a year ago, but here's the "TL;DR" version.

: The skulls for an Ibiesh Jackal and a common Jackal are so radically
: different that not only can they not possibly be the same species, they
: cannot even be part of the same genus or even part of the same family, and
: at best are only part of the same order, though most likely they share
: only the same class. In any case their most recent common ancestor with
: the common Jackal is likely several tens of millions of years ago, and the
: nearly identical appearance from the neck down would have to be just a
: very, very lucky instance of convergent evolution. Even artificial
: selection couldn't produce skulls of such radical structural differences
: within the lowest taxa. Ibiesh Jackals are, biologically speaking, about
: as closely related to the common Jackal as humans are with dolphins.

: Now, the common Jackal and the Skirmishers are morphologically similar enough
: to where they could potentially be of the same genus or at least of the
: same family, and their most recent common ancestor could be as recent as
: several million years ago, but even they are almost certainly not the same
: species as the common Jackal. They are likely at least as closely related
: to each other as humans and other great apes are to each other, but no
: closer than how close humans were with, say, Homo erectus or Homo
: floresiensis .

They have an evolutionary geas duh