It was supposed to be a routine trapping operation targeting a rogue wolf in the Halkidiki region. But when Greek wildlife researchers finally ran the DNA tests, they realized they had stumbled onto something far stranger.
Hidden among 50 wolf samples collected from across the Greek mainland was one individual that did not belong. According to the Greek wildlife group Callisto, the animal turned out to be 55% dog and 45% wolf, a genuine wild hybrid that experts say is not usually supposed to happen in nature.
The Science Behind a Forbidden Match
Wolves and dogs share a tangled evolutionary history that remains surprisingly close. Scientists believe the two diverged sometime between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago, with the domestic dog’s ancestor likely being a long-extinct lineage of gray wolves. Despite that ancient split, they remain 99.9% genetically identical. Unlike horses and donkeys, which produce sterile offspring, wolves and dogs can produce fertile young because their chromosomes divide evenly into pairs, a trait they share with related canids like dingoes and jackals.
But genetics tell only half the story. Behaviorally, wolves and dogs are not inclined to mix. Wolves are intensely territorial animals that breed only once a year. When they encounter a stray or feral dog during that narrow window, their instinct is usually to chase it away or kill it rather than welcome it into the pack.
Still, the fragments of dog ancestry found in more than half of Eurasian wolf genomes tell a different story. They show that interbreeding has occurred naturally over time, even if actual sightings remain scarce. The wild wolf-dog found lurking near Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece, is now living evidence of that phenomenon.
How a Booming Wolf Population Met a Stray Dog Crisis
The discovery came during broader efforts by Callisto to track Greece’s recovering wolf population. Since the Bern Convention banned hunting in 1983, an international treaty designed to protect endangered large carnivores like wolves and bears, the numbers have rebounded significantly. After recently concluding a six-year study on the Greek wolf population, Callisto has determined a total of 2,075 individuals now roam the country. At least three packs of around 31 wolves each have been documented in the Mount Parnitha range, located practically right outside Athens.
At the same time, Greece is grappling with an overwhelming stray dog crisis. According to estimates, over 3 million stray dogs and cats wander the streets, many surviving on restaurant scraps and drifting into rural areas. Some inevitably end up pushing deeper into wolf territory.
The theory proposed by researchers is that one of these stray dogs wandered into wolf territory during breeding season, mated with a wolf, and somehow emerged unscathed. The hybrid discovered near Thessaloniki, the group suggests, is the direct result of that unlikely encounter.
What This Hybrid Is Not
It is important to distinguish this natural hybrid from the recent headlines surrounding the de-extinction of the dire wolf. As Popular Mechanics notes, the Greek creature is not the same phenomenon as Colossal’s attempted project. The biotech company extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf samples and merged it with progenitor cells from existing gray wolves, editing genes to express every dire wolf trait possible. The resulting pups were born to surrogate domestic hound mothers, a laboratory creation rather than a natural occurrence.
The wolf-dog found in Greece is something else entirely. It is the product of two worlds colliding, a wild population rebounding so strongly that it now overlaps with a sea of stray dogs. For researchers at Callisto, the discovery raises new questions about what happens when ancient predators and domestic strays begin to mix, and whether more of these hybrids are lurking in the Greek wilderness, waiting to be found.