Bounty centuries
Erase the competitor
Eurasia and North America paid for dead wolves into the 20th century.
Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Lobo of Currumpaw
- Yellowstone extirpation
- Thinking Like a Mountain
- Isle Royale study starts
- US ESA
- Yellowstone releases
- Mexican wolf releases
- US delisting fights
- Isle Royale rescue
- European pack maps
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed66
Intelligence83
Range75
Resilience62
Cultural impact85
Ecological role94
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Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Did wolves recover everywhere?
Global LC hides Mexican wolves, some European growing pains, and US delisting fights. Resilience here is mid-high because many Holarctic populations rebounded -- not because conflict ended.
What happened in Yellowstone in 1995?
Fourteen wolves from Canada were released (more in 1996). Elk behaviour and riparian vegetation became a long argument, not a cartoon instant forest.
Is the trophic cascade settled?
Early popular accounts over-simplified. Later work kept wolves important and added drought, human hunting, and beaver. The cascade is a research programme, not a poster.
Who was Aldo Leopold here?
A forester who had killed wolves and later wrote the mountain-as-ethics essay (1949). The US environmental canon still starts many wolf talks there.
What is Isle Royale?
A closed wolf-moose system studied since 1958. Inbreeding and later genetic rescue (2018-) made it a lab of isolation.
Are wolves more intelligent than big cats in this atlas?
Pack coordination and canine social cognition sit high. Gorillas and elephants still outrank them. Scores are relative, not IQ certificates.
IUCN: Least Concern (global)
The gray wolf did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.
This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.
Where it began
Pleistocene CanisHolarctic forests and tundra
Timeline
1890sLobo of Currumpaw
Seton hunt and later story -- a guilt template for US wolf writing.
1926Yellowstone extirpation
The last wolves in the park were killed -- the empty that 1995 filled.
1949Thinking Like a Mountain
Leopold essay that made the wolf an ethics object.
1958Isle Royale study starts
Mech, Jordan, Vucetich later -- moose and wolves as a closed book.
1973US ESA
Gray wolves listed; the legal engine of later reintroductions.
1995Yellowstone releases
Canadian wolves in the Northern Range -- a global media return.
1998Mexican wolf releases
Captive-bred C. l. baileyi into Arizona/New Mexico.
2011-20US delisting fights
Great Lakes and Northern Rockies status ping-ponged in courts.
2018Isle Royale rescue
Translocations to address inbreeding after the island population collapsed.
2020sEuropean pack maps
Germany and France treat returning packs as a livestock ministry file.
The eras
1949-73
Ethics then statute
Leopold to the ESA -- a paper trail for return.
1995-98
Reintroduction years
Yellowstone and Mexican wolf releases as twin experiments.
2011-20
Delist and relist
US courts treated wolves as a perpetual motion machine.
2020s
Europe and islands
Pack maps in the EU and genetic rescue on Isle Royale.
Milestones
Leopold essay
1949A killed wolf as an ethics origin story.
Yellowstone 1995
1995The return that every later cascade talk cites.
Isle Royale rescue
2018-A closed study admitted it needed new genes.
Reading gray wolf history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.
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