Scientists Find Red Wolf DNA in a Unique Group of Wild Dogs in Texas

One of America’s native wild canines, the red wolf, has teetered on the brink of extinction for decades. And despite the efforts of a captive breeding program started in the 1970s, only about 40 such wolves are known to be still living in the wild today, all in North Carolina. But researchers at Princeton University have made a strange discovery that might spell good news for the future of the species: A population of wild dogs, isolated off the coast of Texas, that seem to carry red wolf genes, including remnants of DNA thought to be lost forever. The researchers’ discovery wasn’t intentional, according to a press release from Princeton University detailing their subsequent study, which was published this month in the journal Genes. Ron Wooten, a wildlife biologist living in Galveston, Texas, had started tracking a population of wild dogs on the nearby Galveston Island. From afar, the Galveston dogs didn’t quite look like the coyotes native to the area. And people have claimed to have seen red wolves in the Gulf Coast area, decades after they were declared extinct in the U.S. in 1980. Wooten wanted to get a second opinion, so he got in touch with Bridgett vonHoldt, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist who runs the North American Canine Ancestry Project at Princeton University. Her lab tested two samples from Wooten, both taken from dogs that sadly became roadkill. And when they compared the genetics of these dogs to DNA samples from a variety of known wild dog species in the U.S., including coyotes, grey wolves, and captive red wolves, they found that the Galveston dogs had some genes only known to belong to red wolves...MORE