Beth Shapiro

You shouldn't just discount it.

I mean, I'm the person who has tested insulation that somebody told me Bigfoot peed on and participated in it.

Because if it's real, I want to be the person who finds it, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So Bridget says this guy who lives down in the coast of Louisiana sent her a picture of an animal that she's like, that is not a wolf and it is not a coyote and I don't know what it is and it's crazy.

And she looked at it and she goes, yeah.

Yeah.

It's not.

It's something else.

It's something in between those.

And so she tested it and found that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves.

And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes.

Canids are always hybridizing with each other.

We know that because there are wolves that are black because black gene for wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog...

had his way with a wolf in heat, right?

And that's how that allele got into that population.

So we know canids do this all the time.

And she was like, this is so cool because this captive breeding population was established with just a few founder individuals.

And the team working with them are doing a great job trying to maximize genetic diversity by picking who's going to pair with who to keep all that diversity there.