Coyote trapped at SRS carries DNA of grey wolf

Just when you think a coyote is a whitetail’s worst nightmare, Savannah River Site researchers have found something even scarier: a super-sized coyote that is part grey wolf. The big female, which weighed in at 64.4 pounds, was trapped by U.S. Forest Service biologists in late 2010 as part of an ongoing study into coyote predation on whitetail fawns. “From our perspective, it’s an extremely rare, isolated animal, based on the sampling we’ve done,” said research biologist John Kilgo, whose team has trapped about 500 coyotes and examined another 200 animals killed during SRS deer hunts in recent years. The unusually large animal – roughly twice the size of typical southeastern coyotes – was tested at a lab in Canada, which confirmed she carried the DNA of a Canadian grey wolf...more