Kenai Peninsula wolf

The Kenai Peninsula wolf (Canis lupus alces), also known as the Kenai Peninsula grey wolf, is an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf that lived on the Kenai Peninsula in southern Alaska.

Taxonomy
The subspecies was classified in 1941 as one of the four in Alaska by Edward Alphonso Goldman. It is recognized as a subspecies of Canis lupus in the taxonomic authority Mammal Species of the World (2005).

History
Wolves were common on the Peninsula before 1900, however, gold was discovered there in 1895. Miners, fearing rabies, commenced poisoning, hunting and trapping the wolves and by 1915 they had been extirpated. The Kenai Peninsula wolf was officially declared extinct in 1925.

Re-population of wolves from other areas onto the peninsula did not occur until the 1960s. It has been shown through DNA studies that, at minimum, the current population of wolves on the Kenai Peninsula mated with other Alaskan subspecies, as the structure of the current wolf population's DNA is similar to other mainland Alaskan subspecies.

Description
The Kenai Peninsula wolf was dependent on the very large moose of the region (hence the trinomial alces, or moose) and Goldman proposed that its large size was an adaption to this.

The Smithsonian Institution has a skull specimen of the Kenai Peninsula wolf, numbered as USNM 147471.