Southern Rocky Mountain wolf
extinct subspecies of the gray wolf
The Southern Rocky Mountain wolf (Canis lupus youngi) is an extinct subspecies of gray wolf which was once distributed over southeastern Idaho, southwestern Wyoming, northeastern Nevada, Utah, western and central Colorado, northwestern Arizona (but north of the Grand Canyon), and northwestern New Mexico. It was a light-colored, medium-sized subspecies closely resembling the Great Plains wolf (C. l. nubilus), though larger, with more blackish-buff hairs on the back. This wolf went extinct by 1935. Wolves of the subspecies Canis lupus occidentalis have now been reestablished in Idaho and Wyoming.
Taxonomy
It is named after Stanley P. Young, who described it with Edward Alphonso Goldman in 1937. This wolf is recognized as a subspecies of Canis lupus in the taxonomic authority Mammal Species of the World (2005).
Lineage
Gray wolves (Canis lupus) migrated from Eurasia into North America 70,000–23,000 years ago and gave rise to at least two morphologically and genetically distinct groups. One group is represented by the extinct Beringian wolf and the other by the modern populations. One author proposes that the Southern Rocky Mountain wolf forms part of a clade whose ancestors pushed the Mexican wolf's range more southwards.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Southern Rocky Mountain wolf” is extinct subspecies of the gray wolf. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Southern, Rocky and Mountain, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q912965. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1937 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Southern Rocky Mountain wolf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.