Natural History

The pelt of Hagenbeck's wolf.

In 1927, German zoologist Lorenz Hagenbeck procured a pelt from a fur trader in Buenos Aires. There were four black pelts available, and all appeared to have come from the same species. All looked remarkably like black wolf pelts. Hagenbeck purchased one of the skins, and it was sent to Germany, where it was mostly ignored for over a decade.

In 1940, Dr. Ingo Krumbiegel began to research the skin. Krumbiegel had found a skull of a unknown canid in South America ten years earlier, and he wanted to connect the skull he found to the pelt that Hagenbeck had purchased.   Perhaps they belonged to an undiscovered species of South American wild dog.

Krumbiegel’s skull  measured 31 centimeters, which was significantly larger than that of a maned wolf. The dentition suggested that the animal was an omnivore.

Krumbiegel named the creature Dasycyon hagenbecki, but because no live specimens were ever found, it has never been officially designated as a species.

Without a body, Krumbiegel could never fully prove that the skull he found had anything to do with Hagenbeck’s pelt. The fact that the two pieces of evidence represented enigmatic canines from South America does not automatically mean that the two are representatives of each other.

Further, one must always be a little skeptical of any German or Austrian science that comes from the period of 1933-1945  in the case of Germany or from 1938-1945 in Austria.

The skull disappeared during World War II, so we are left with only a pelt as evidence of this supposed species.

1960, it was determined that the pelt was that of a domestic dog.  In 2000, attempts to analyze the pelt for DNA were inconclusive. Traces of dog, wolf, human, and pig DNA were found, but it was decided that the pelt’s DNA was too contaminated to make a full determination of its identity

So what was Hagenbeck’s wolf?

Despite the contamination, I don’t think it is very had to come up with some hypotheses.

1. It is a domestic dog. The fur trader got three pelts from someone who killed some big dogs that were very similar in type and color. Selling dog pelts is a common practice in parts of Asia. I would assume that a lot of that was sold throughout history actually came from dogs. It’s just very easy to get dog furs, and if you’re selling them to a foreigner who doesn’t know the fauna of your region, it is very easy to offload them as something rare.

2. It’s from an escaped pack of wolves or wolf hybrids. Traveling menageries were not unknown in the region, and it would make sense that a traveling menagerie might have a few wolves or wolf hybrids. Of course, such animals are hard to keep, so it would also make sense that someone might release them into the wild. Or sell them to a fur trapper who then sells them to a fur trader as some kind of rare specimen.  The pelt has some characteristics that are associated with black North American wolves. It has lighter shadings that come throught its undercoat.  Black North American wolves almost always lighten as they age, and many of them start out already much lighter in color than most black dogs.

3. It actually is a unique South American canid. I think this is less likely, but it could possibly be a descendant of a population of an American member of the genus Canis— like the dire wolf (Canis dirus) or Armbruster’s wolf (Canis armbrusteri). However, the pelt’s black coloration probably precludes this as a possibility. It is doubtful that anyone could find a population of wild dogs from the genus Canis with black coloration before the domestication of the dog. Black North American wolves and coyotes  and black Italian wolves  got their coloration through hybridizing with black domestic dogs.  Hagenbeck’s wolf could also be able to interbreed with domestic dogs, but I think it is much more likley that this animal represents an out of place wolf hybrid, pure wolf, or wolfish domestic dog.

Whatever it was, the connections between this pelt and the others that the trader was selling and the skull that Krumbiegel found have not been proven. It is a best speculative to assume that they were even connected in the first place.

If we had that skull, we might be able to make some determination as to whether an omnivorous canid that is larger than a maned wolf can be found in South America.