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Here's the news article:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14383883/

I only wish they had a better photo. A head close-up is nice, but I'd like to see a full-body photograph. The legend it is being linked with sounds vaguely werewolf-like, but without enough details to truly pin it down as such.

It might be the same as this mystery beast, though I haven't yet scraped up enough details to be sure. The second link makes it look even more werewolf-like.

Looks like a mutt of somekind, the eyes are kind of weird though. Like a cross between a wolf and a short muzzled dog breed or something.

Poking around on http://www.cryptomundo.com/ some more has led be to believe that:

1) Loren Coleman was misquoted in the first article.

2) There are apparently at least two carcasses being put forth as the mystery beast, one of which is almost certainly a regular dog.

3) People are really getting hysterical about this.

4) There is (or are) one (or more) Maine mystery beast(s) of a canine nature that exist in local legend and sound kind of werewolf-like. Whether these legendary creatures have any connection to the carcasses is debatable, but from what little I can scrape up about the legends (which is very little so far since most of the discussion involves the carcasses, not the legends) I would say that there is a good chance that the appearance of the carcasses differs from the description of the legendary beast(s).

You were beat to the punch about this article, Jamie. There is already a thread about this in the general section and it is already a couple months old.

http://www.calypso-blue.com/werewolf/vi ... php?t=3112

This is a peculiar animal nonetheless and it does have similarities to the local lore. However, I am skeptical if this animal is the creature the locals talked about for years. Nevertheless, there could have been a group of these running around the countryside for years but have remained relatively unknown until the discovery of the carcass.

This has been posted before.
I think that some researchers eventually decided it was a dog with some kind of genetic disease.

Yeah, it was posted before in August and I provided a link to the original thread in my previous post.

In addition, it is not a dog with a genetic disease, but rather a rare wolf/dog hybrid.

"In addition..."

No need to be condescending.

Ashkin-Tyr wrote:You were beat to the punch about this article, Jamie. There is already a thread about this in the general section and it is already a couple months old.

http://www.calypso-blue.com/werewolf/vi ... php?t=3112

This is a peculiar animal nonetheless and it does have similarities to the local lore. However, I am skeptical if this animal is the creature the locals talked about for years. Nevertheless, there could have been a group of these running around the countryside for years but have remained relatively unknown until the discovery of the carcass.

Go ahead and merge then, sorry.

No worries Jamie, it's hard to search through all the board before you post anything. It happens.

Doesn't the article mention an older incident where the body was discovered to be a wolfdog and that this a newer event?

here is the other post about it.

http://calypso-blue.com/werewolf/viewtopic.php?t=3112

i'll merge them later.

Rhuen wrote:Doesn't the article mention an older incident where the body was discovered to be a wolfdog and that this a newer event?

If you're referring to the event that I think you are, that is the one that Loren Coleman was misquoted on. That other carcass was a full-blooded wolf, not a wolf-dog, and it had no obvious relation to this case. However, reporters were claiming that Loren Coleman had said it was tested as a wolf-dog.

PariahPoet wrote:"In addition..."

No need to be condescending.

Oh--I did not mean it like that! You misinterpret me, PariahPoet... I did not mean it in a condescending manner. I merely used it for grammar structure. I apologize if I did any harm, I certainly did not mean to.

Jamie, I am sorry if I came off as harsh... I certainly did not want to.

....

It seems that I always make people mad when I have no intention of doing so... I'm sorry.

No, I'm sorry. That was my misinterpretation. I've had a lot of people jump on me lately, so I guess I was just a little on edge. I shouldn't read so much into innocent posts.

How could they tell whether it was a wolf or wolf-dog by genetic testing? Wolves and domestic dogs have the exact same genes. The only difference is the phenotype.

PariahPoet wrote:How could they tell whether it was a wolf or wolf-dog by genetic testing? Wolves and domestic dogs have the exact same genes. The only difference is the phenotype.

If they can do genetic testing to determine whether so-and-so is a child's father or not, and if they can do genetic testing and then announce that wolves and dogs split about 100,000 years ago, and that coyotes are about 3 times as ancient as wolves, I think they can tell if an animal is a wolf-dog hybrid or not.

yeesh

Yow! People people..Lets not get all snappy on this..It's an interesting subject, though posted before some questions will be asked..No need to be so rude..Did anyone even look at that thread I started a lil bit ago?

http://calypso-blue.com/werewolf/viewtopic.php?t=3520

It might not be considered family in some but we are a group and we should try to want as one

PariahPoet wrote:yeesh

Sorry if I'm over-explaining and boring you, but I generally assume, on this board, that most people would rather see more details rather than less.

I think its a chromosome thing that lets them tell the difference between wolves and dogs.

Well usually one can just look at a Hybrid to tell if it is a hybrid through key traits. (I'm assuming that the creature in the pictures is a wolf dog hybrid) But those traits also depend on the percentage the hybrid is. Higher % would mean more wolf like charascteristics, while low % would mean less wolf like characteristics. But anyway, DNA is also a way. All they have to do is take a cheek cell, look at the DNA and compare it to dog DNA, Wolf DNA and Hybrid DNA.

That's what I was saying though. Wolf DNA is exactly the same as dog dna. They aren't even seperate species. Just different breeds of the same animal.

Exactly. When you look at a dog, your neighbor's dog, any dog, you are looking at a domesticated wolf. I think that's a pretty cool concept.
Edit: http://www.kc.net/~wolf2dog/fido.htm take a look at this.

PariahPoet wrote:That's what I was saying though. Wolf DNA is exactly the same as dog dna. They aren't even seperate species. Just different breeds of the same animal.

Yes, but there is a chromosomal difference. A dog is basically an inbred deformed wolf with down syndrome. Its chromosome count is different than that of its wild cousins.

Rhuen wrote:

PariahPoet wrote:That's what I was saying though. Wolf DNA is exactly the same as dog dna. They aren't even seperate species. Just different breeds of the same animal.

Yes, but there is a chromosomal difference. A dog is basically an inbred deformed wolf with down syndrome. Its chromosome count is different than that of its wild cousins.

Nope, not true.

"It takes two to tango ...

Virtually all members of the animal kingdom, including dogs, are diploid, which means their chromosomes come in pairs. Dogs have 38 pairs of autosomes. Humans, by contrast, have 21. (They also each have a pair of sex chromosomes). This doesn’t mean dogs have more genes than people do, only that the genes are arranged differently.

These different chromosome arrangements are why it is possible to interbreed some closely related species, say a dog and a wolf, and get breedable offspring. Dogs and wolves have the same chromosome count, and their chromosomes are very similar—so similar that some scientists consider dogs and wolves to be a single species."

Quoted from http://devinefarm.net/reporter/march_2002.htm