The moon, a fragment-silver that barely illuminated the night's sky, shone through holes in the cloud lining. And through the night, lit by the moon, the hounds hunted.
The thaylacine, the 'Tasmanian wolf', was a striking example of convergent evolution. It looked incredibly like a canine. Its skeleton was even more similar; Professor Ikari had, like many other lecturers, enjoyed slipping a thaylacine skull into many an unexpecting anatomy student's final test, and watching as they misidentified it as a dog. And despite its canid appearance, it was actually no more related to the placental wolves than any other marsupial.
It had already gone extinct once before.
But now it was back; back by the grace of Baraqiel, and the strange atavisms and recursions of extinct species which had been caused. In fact, the slightest hint could be found in the genetics of this pack that they had once been dingoes, placental mammals. That a creature could leap between clades, taking up features which should not, and could have not existed in their native branch of the tree of life, made a mockery of genetics.
But, hey, AT-Fields. What're you going to do about it?