In snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas lives a light coloured beast. A wolf that serves as an important predator in the Himalayan ecosystem. For the longest time, people were not concerned about their existence because, well, their look-a-likes were everywhere.
In 2014, Geraldine Werhahn, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), began tracking these wolves to realise they might be wrongly recognised as the widespread Grey Wolves.
Werhahn began the Himalayan Wolves Project in Nepal to understand how the wolves managed to live at such high altitudes. She collected wolf scat and reached out to her colleagues working in the Himalayas tracking snow leopards. Many researchers often collect scat samples of rare animals in the mountains since very little is known about species in the Himalayas.
After genetic analysis of over 280 scat and hair samples in her lab, Werhahn concluded that 691,000 to 740,000 years ago, Himalayan Wolves split from the Holarctic grey wolf. They most likely developed before contemporary grey wolves (Canis lupus).
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