On a humid stretch of prairie behind the subdivisions and beach houses of Galveston Island, something unexpected moves through the cordgrass at dusk.
Locals call them coyotes. Officially, that’s what they are.
But genetically, many of these canids are something far more complicated.
Watch my interview with Colossal Biosciences on this topic here.
Recent testing has revealed that some of the island’s coyotes carry astonishing levels of red wolf ancestry in a few cases, as much as 70 percent.
That’s a startling number when you consider that the Red Wolf is one of the most endangered mammals in North America, with only a small, managed population remaining in the wild.
To the untrained eye, a Galveston coyote looks like any other Gulf Coast song dog: lean, long-legged, wary. But hidden in its DNA is the genetic echo of a predator that once roamed from Texas to the Carolinas.
Some researchers have started calling them the “ghost wolves” of the Gulf Coast, living remnants of a species many believed was functionally lost outside a tightly controlled recovery zone.
My latest video talks about a unique effort involving cloning to help forward the conservation of the red wolf.
Chester Moore
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