India, Oct. 22 -- Imagine an animal that vanished from the wild and then left a clue in a place no one expected. That's what happened on Galveston Island, Texas. A 2018 study titled 'Rediscovery of Red Wolf Ghost Alleles in a Canid Population Along the American Gulf Coast,' published in the journal Genes, found red wolf genes in the DNA of wild canines there. Red wolves had been declared extinct in the wild by 1980. Even the scientists were surprised by the finding, because conventional science had dismissed red wolf sightings along the Gulf Coast as misidentified coyotes.

Red wolves (Canis rufus) once ranged throughout the southeastern United States. They are bigger than coyotes but smaller than gray wolves. By the 1970s, they were beco...