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The wolf (Canis lupus; [b] pl.: wolves), also known as the grey wolf or gray wolf, is a canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, including the dog and dingo , though grey wolves, as popularly understood, only comprise naturally-occurring wild subspecies.
The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, whose name was derived from the Gaulish Daoi, meaning "wolf people". The wolf was viewed as the lord of all animals and as the only effective power against evil. [60] The ancient Greeks associated wolves with their plague-and-healing god Apollo.
A study of the estimated bite force at the canine teeth of a large sample of living and fossil mammalian predators, when adjusted for their body mass, found that for placental mammals the bite force at the canines (in Newtons/kilogram of body weight) was greatest in the extinct dire wolf (163), followed among the modern canids by the four ...
The Wolf and his Master, as illustrated by Harrison Weir in Stories of Animal Sagacity. Wolves are sometimes kept as exotic pets , and in some rarer occasions, as working animals . Although closely related to domesticated dogs , wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, and generally, a greater amount of ...
Apart from domestication, humans have harmed the wolf by restricting its habitat through persecution. This has caused a dramatic decrease in its population size over the last two centuries. [169] [170] The shrinking of its habitats that overlap with those of close-relatives such as dogs and coyotes have led to numerous occurrences of hybridization.
Northwestern wolves are one of the largest subspecies of wolves. In British Columbia, Canada, five adult females averaged 42.5 kg or 93.6 lbs with a range of 85 lbs to 100 lbs (38.6 - 45.4 kg) and ten adult males averaged 112.2 lbs or 51.7 kg with a range of 105 lbs to 135 lbs (47.6 - 61.2 kg), with a weight range for all adults of 38.6 kg to 61.2 kg (85 – 135 lbs). [9]
The Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), also known as the lobo mexicano (or, simply, lobo) [a] is a subspecies of gray wolf (C. lupus) native to eastern and southeastern Arizona and western and southern New Mexico (in the United States) and fragmented areas of northern Mexico.
The red wolf is an enigmatic taxon, of which there are two proposals over its origin. One is that the red wolf is a distinct species (C. rufus) that has undergone human-influenced admixture with coyotes. The other is that it was never a distinct species but was derived from past admixture between coyotes and gray wolves, due to the gray wolf ...