Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I think it's the other way round. The reports we're hearing in Maryland is that the coyote packs heading this way from Canada have some larger individuals who are obviously of mixed ancestry.
Coyotes seem to be somewhat more adventurous, gregarious and curious than wolves--which is exactly what you'd expect in a species that has adapted to blending into human settlements and scavenging from our trash. And these are exactly the personality traits that lead to inter-species dating. In the Southwest they mate with large dogs, although they'll just as happily eat the small ones.
If a female wolf gave birth to a hybrid pup, he would probably not be very welcome in the pack, if only because by their standards he'd be a runt. He'd probably go exploring and hook up with the coyotes.
Occasionally a she-wolf will mate with a satisfactorily large dog, and that pup would be more readily accepted into the pack. I don't know if biologists have tried to find traces of that hybridization. It's very hard to distinguish wolf DNA from dog DNA since they are, after all, the same species. I remember one of the slides at that National Geographic exhibition said that the DNA of a Great Dane and a Chihuahua differ more from each other than either differs from the wolf.
All of this despite the fact that dogs have a population-wide set of adaptations that qualify them as a separate subspecies: smaller brains (for the lower-protein diet of a scavenger), slightly different teeth (for eating more carrots than caribou), and considerably different instincts (happy to pack-bond with other species and even allow one to be the alpha).