Mongolian wolf
| Mongolian wolf | |
|---|---|
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Carnivora |
| Family: | Canidae |
| Genus: | Canis |
| Species: | C. lupus |
| Subspecies: | C. l. chanco |
| Trinomial name | |
| Canis lupus chanco Gray, 1863 |
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| Map showing the range of C. l. chanco (blue) and C. l. filchneri (pink) in China and surrounding countries | |
| Synonyms | |
The Mongolian wolf (Canis lupus chanco) is a subspecies of the grey wolf which is native to Mongolia, northern and central China, Korea, and the Ussuri region of Russia.
The Mongolian wolf was first described by John Edward Gray in 1863 as Canis chanco. Gray based his description on the skin of a wolf that had been shot by Lieut. W. P. Hodnell in Chinese Tartary and later presented by Lady A. Harvey to the British Museum, where it had been named by Dr. Gray F Cants as chanco. The common Mongolian word for wolf is "chono".St. George Jackson Mivart classified the wolf as Canis lupus chanco in 1880 based on an examination of Gray's specimen. In 1923, Japanese zoologist Yoshio Abe proposed separating the wolves of the Korean Peninsula from C. chanco as a separate species, C. coreanus, due to their comparatively narrower muzzles. This distinction was contested by Reginald Pocock, who dismissed it as a local variant of C. chanco. In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under the wolf Canis lupus the taxonomic synonyms for the subspecies Canis lupus chanco. Wozencraft classified C. coreanus (Abe, 1923) as one of its synonyms.
There remains taxonomic confusion over the Mongolian wolf. In 1941, Pocock had referred to the Tibetan wolf as C. l. laniger and classified it as a synonym under C. l. chanco. However, Wozencraft included C. l. laniger as a synonym for C. l. filchneri Matschie (1907). There are some researchers who still refer to Pocock's classification of the Tibetan wolf as C. l. chanco, which has caused taxonomic confusion. The NCBI/Genbank lists C. l. chanco as the Mongolian wolf and separately C. l. laniger as the Tibetan wolf, and there are academic works that refer to C. l. chanco as the Mongolian wolf.
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