'Wolf-like' creature shot on Montana ranch puzzles experts

Bears and wolves mating: http://www.macroevolution.net/bear-dog-hybrids.html

Canids are pretty much a superspecies anyways.

Consider brown bears and polar bears. We consider them 2 species yet they can successfully interbreed. The main reason they don't is that their ranges haven't historically overlapped. Geography, not biology, was the separator. You could view them as one species with a bivariate distribution, in the late stages of diverging into two.

Canids likewise viewed as one species with significant ecological clustering, but divided this time by behavior.

The long nails (I wouldn't call them claws) look like a dog that doesn't get outside much. If a dog is outside, walking around, digging etc the nails get ground down and would be much shorter. If this were a wild animal, those nails would definitely be shorter.

I would say this was a house pet in the very recent past (whether a dog, or some wolf-dog type animal).

Looks to me like it has coyote blood in it. My guess is it's a coywolf. Let's wait and see if I'm right.

It does look kind of bear like, since the article mentions it...

> It's too far north to be the legendary Chupacabra

Perhaps some gente moved to Montana and took their pet Chupacabra with them.

Looks like a bear mated with a wolf. They are both from the Caniformia suborder.

Could be an extinct Hemicyoninae, meaning “dog-bear”.

Could the Chupacabra actually just be a large shaggy wolf?

There hasn't been Direwolves south of the wall for more than two centuries.

This was way cooler when I read it as “worf-like”

It's a... man bear pig.

wolfdog?