Neil Adams

1 Introduction The grey wolf (Canis lupus L., 1758) is an ecological success story across the Holarctic, having persisted through multiple climate fluctuations since the Middle Pleistocene (Iurino et al. 2022). Once the world's most widely distributed mammal, its range has declined by about one third due to human persecution, including retaliation for livestock depredation and efforts to limit predation on wild game, as well as habitat fragmentation (Boitani et al. 2023).

ABSTRACT Although fossil assemblages from the late Early Pleistocene are very rare in Britain, the site of Westbury Cave in Somerset, England, has the potential to address this gap. The mammal fossils recovered previously from the Siliceous Member in Westbury Cave, though few in number, have hinted at an age for the deposits that is as yet unparalleled in Britain.

1. Introduction The Multituberculata (Allotheria, Mammalia) was one of the most successful orders of mammals to have ever lived, persisting for over 130 Myr, from the Middle Jurassic [1] to the late Eocene [2,3]. The extinction of this successful group has remained a long unresolved issue.