Grey Wolf Research Paper

Mateo Reading
12-18-15
Mr. Hooker Introduction The wolf is truly a special animal. As the most widely distributed of all land mammals, the wolf, formally the gray wolf (Canis lupus), is also one of the most adaptable. It inhabits all the vegetation types of the Northern Hemisphere and preys on all the large mammals living there. It also feeds on all the other animals in its environment, scavenges, and can even eat fruits and berries. Wolves frequent forests and prairies, tundra, barren ground, mountains, deserts, and swamps. Some wolves even visit large cities, and, of course, the wolf's domesticated version, the dog, thrives in urban environments.

Wolfs
The gray wolf or grey wolf Canis
It is nonetheless closely related enough to smaller Canis species, such as the eastern wolf, coyote and golden jackal to produce fertile hybrids. Its closest relative is the domestic dog, with which it shared a common European ancestor which likely diverged 40,000 years ago. It is the only species of Canis to have a range encompassing both the Old and New Worlds, and originated in Eurasia during the Pleistocene, colonizing North America on at least three separate occasions during the Rancholabrean. It is a social animal, travelling in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair, accompanied by the pair's adult offspring. The gray wolf is typically an apex predator throughout its range, with only humans and tigers posing a serious threat to it. It feeds primarily on large ungulates, though it also eats smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and
Usually this male and female are the only animals of the pack to breed. All of a pack's adults help to care for young In 1993, a study of the wolf-like canids found that there was a close kinship between domestic dogs, gray wolves, coyotes and Simien jackals but with a distance from the African wild dog and from the golden, side-striped and black-backed jackals. The domestic dog was an extremely close relative of the gray wolf, differing from it by at most 0.2% of the maternal mitochondrial Cytochrome b gene marker. In comparison, the gray wolf differs from its closest wild relative, the coyote, by about 4%. Therefore, the study concluded that the molecular genetic evidence did not support theories that dogs arose from jackal ancestors. The study proposed the hypothesis that because of the diversity of dog remains found in archaeological sites, that dogs may be derived from several different ancestral gray wolf populations. Later that year, the domestic dog Canis familiar is was reclassified as Canis lupus familiar is, a subspecies of Canis lupus in Mammal Species of the World.[26][76]pups by bringing them food and watching In 1999, a review of the scientific literature regarding the genetic origin of the dog proposed a number of hypotheses. The molecular data indicated that dogs have protein alleles in common with wolves, share highly polymorphic