The difference between wolf and dog heads

Below is some excellent closeup footage of a wolf at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana.

Source.

You can see how much more massive his head is than any domestic dog. His muzzle is also much longer than you’d expect to see in most dogs.

And because he’s a captive wolf, his muzzle and head are not exactly the same as the wild wolf’s. A wild wolf has to use its jaws and head muscles to actually kill large game, and the muscle and bone interact in such a way to produce an even more robust head.

Now, here, I’m talking about the big wolves of the northern continents. These are big game hunting wolves.

The smaller wolves of a more southerly distribution have smaller heads.

I’ve always found it interesting that the feral dog literature always says that no population of domestic dog has ever reverted to the wolf phenotype or wolf. However, I think that part of the reason why this appears in the literature is that the researchers making that analysis compare feral dogs to the big game hunting wolves.

That’s a false comparison, for most feral dogs live either where the garbage eating is far easier than hunting (so much so that the local wolves compete with the dogs for garbage–as it is in Italy or Romania) or they live in an environment where the heat prevents the evolution of large body sizes (like Australia, where the most wolf-like of feral dogs lives.) If we humans would disappear, dogs would probably evolve back into their lupine form and probably combine with wolf and coyote population.