The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has launched an investigation after a hunter recently reported his harvest, which he believed to be a coyote — but after further genetic testing, the kill proved to be something far rarer.
The DNR announced in a press release that the animal killed in Calhoun County, Michigan’s southern Lower Peninsula, was actually a gray wolf.
While the DNR does conduct searches in the Lower Peninsula, there have not been many signs of wolf presence since the population was reestablished in the 1980s, according to a DNR press release.
The DNR was not made aware of the discovery until the hunter’s prize started circulating on Facebook, Brian Roell, a wildlife biologist and large carnivore specialist with the Michigan DNR, told Fox News Digital.
The Facebook post revealed that a hunter had shot and killed a new world record coyote weighing 84 pounds. However, eastern coyotes typically weigh 25 to 40 pounds, the DNR’s press release said.
A local biologist reached out to Roell in late January and asked him to look at the photos that had been posted and after viewing those images, Roell immediately knew it was not a coyote, he said.
