![]() These estimates indicate that Ezo wolves colonized Japan more recently than Japanese wolves from the Asian continent during the last glacial period via a land bridge with Sakhalin Island, which existed up to 10,000 years ago. The coalescence time back to the most recent common ancestor for two Ezo wolf samples was estimated to be 3,100 (between 700–5,900) years ago, and the Ezo wolf is estimated to have diverged from North American wolves 9,300 (between 5,700–13,700) years ago. : p44Īnalysis of its mitochondrial DNA showed it to be identical with gray wolf specimens from Canada, Alaska and the USA, indicating that the ancestor of the Ezo wolf was genetically related to the ancestor of North American wolves. In 1935, Pocock examined one of the specimens in the British Museum that had been obtained in 1886 and named it Canis lupus rex because of its large size. In 1931, Kishida Kyukishi described a skull from a wolf killed in 1881 and declared it to be a distinct subspecies. In 1913, Hatta Suburō proposed that the wolf might be related to the Siberian wolf but had no living specimens to undertake further analysis. In 1889, the wolf became extinct on Hokkaido island. Later, explorers to the Kuril islands of Iturup and Kunashir believed that the wolves they saw there were the Japanese subspecies. The specimens were noticeably different and explained to be local varieties of the same subspecies. In 1890, the skulls of Japanese wolves ( Canis lupus hodophilax) were compared with those of wolves from Hokkaido in the British Museum. The Ezō wolf, or Hokkaidō wolf ( Canis lupus hattai Kishida, 1931) is an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf ( Canis lupus).
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