A new DNA study reveals a previously unidentified North American ‘polar wolf’
From Arctic Today:
Biologists have long been aware that northeastern Canada and Greenland had been home to two distinct types of Arctic wolf. Now, a comparison of the genomes of Arctic wolves with the genomes of wolves from the rest of North America seems to have put an end to a long-standing discussion about whether groups living on Ellesmere Island and in northern and eastern Greenland should should be considered to make up a third population.
The research, described in a paper published in PLOS Genetics, an on-line journal, also suggests that a fourth, now-extinct, group may have lived in eastern Greenland until the 1930s, when commercial hunters exterminated the local population.
