Gray wolfUS FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, JOHN AND KAREN HOLLINGSWORTH
Gray wolves, pushed to near extinction in the 1960s, have roamed North America alongside two other wolf species—the red wolf in the southeastern U.S. and the Eastern wolf in the area surrounding the Great Lakes. But an analysis of their genomes has revealed a surprise: they are all actually one type of wolf, with varying amounts of coyote DNA, a study reported this week (July 27) in Science Advances.
“Wolf biologists and others have been waiting for this sort of definitive analysis for years,” says Susan Haig, a wildlife ecologist at the US Geological Survey in Corvallis, Oregon, told Science.
Robert Wayne, a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues
analyzed the genomes of 12 gray wolves, six Eastern wolves, three red ...
