Nightmarish Wolf-Dog Mating Led to Darker Wolves

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090205-wolf-coat-colors.html

This article was written by Christine Dell’Amore for National Geographic News on February 5, 2009. It is about the discovery of wolves with darker coats in North America. It’s a fact that domestic dogs are genetic descendants of wolves, but researchers are finding that it is possible that dog genes are somehow moving into the wolf’s gene pool.

Geneticist Greg Barsh has stated that the darker wolves do not necessarily resemble dogs and looked at their genes to try and figure out why the different color variations have occurred. Scientists are able to figure out the reasons for colorings in other animals, but the studies on these variations in wolves were found inconclusive.

It has been studied and reported that Native Americans, over a thousand years ago, kept both dogs and wolves as pets, further mating them, and may have created new “hybrid animals” that passed down their genes to new generations.

Darker wolves are also more likely to live in forests for a reason unknown. Since wolves don’t depend on their coats being masked by camouflage to hunt for food, there is no known benefit to the darker color, however, the same genes that make the color of their fur darker has been linked to helping the immune system in humans.