Below is some excellent closeup footage of a wolf at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana.
You can see how much more massive his head is than any domestic dog. His muzzle is also much longer than you’d expect to see in most dogs.
And because he’s a captive wolf, his muzzle and head are not exactly the same as the wild wolf’s. A wild wolf has to use its jaws and head muscles to actually kill large game, and the muscle and bone interact in such a way to produce an even more robust head.
Now, here, I’m talking about the big wolves of the northern continents. These are big game hunting wolves.
The smaller wolves of a more southerly distribution have smaller heads.
I’ve always found it interesting that the feral dog literature always says that no population of domestic dog has ever reverted to the wolf phenotype or wolf. However, I think that part of the reason why this appears in the literature is that the researchers making that analysis compare feral dogs to the big game hunting wolves.
That’s a false comparison, for most feral dogs live either where the garbage eating is far easier than hunting (so much so that the local wolves compete with the dogs for garbage–as it is in Italy or Romania) or they live in an environment where the heat prevents the evolution of large body sizes (like Australia, where the most wolf-like of feral dogs lives.) If we humans would disappear, dogs would probably evolve back into their lupine form and probably combine with wolf and coyote population.
I must comment on the howling. There was a wolf-dog hybrid in the town where my cousin lives in New Hampshire. The people kept it on a 20? foot chain next to the house. One evening while fishing the river that ran next to the house I heard the most eerie howl. Now I’m really a city boy and have only seen wolves in a zoo so I was not only surprised to hear this but I must admit also scared because I didn’t know where it came from. I looked around and spotted this hybrid sitting on its haunches, nose pointed in the air, thankfully still chained. Its howl was one long drawn out howl– much longer than Tristan’s. Needless to say this creeped me out so I had to quit fishing and go home. I really didn’t want to find out if anything was going to respond to this howling.
In Northern New Hampshire, it might be possible to see pure wolves. They are occasionally seen, and I’m sure you’ve heard that an 85 pound “coyote” was killed in Massachusetts. (It was later found to be a wolf– the same subspecies that is found in Quebec.)
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/03/first_wolf_foun.html