Color: Average wolves have grey fur with small patches of white, black, yellow and brown hairs mixed in. Fur color varies from totally white, like the polar wolf, to completely black, like some timber wolves. Wolves' fur color can alos be grey, black, brown, white, yellow and red. But wolves found in the same area usually have similar colored fur.

Habitat: Nearly all habitats except tropical rain forests and arid deserts.

Life span: Roughly 6 - 10 years in the wild. They can live up to 18 years in captivity.

Kingdom: Animal Phylum: Chordata Subphylum: Vertebrata Class: Mammalia Order: Carnivora Family: Canidae

Size Average Length: 120 to 200 cm, from nose to tail tip. Can grow up to 230-240 cm. Average Weight: Between 20 to 80 kg, male and 18 to 55, female. Average wolves weight 35-45 kg.

Reproduction: Wolves breed once a year. Their breeding season is usually January through February. The mother gives birth 63 days later, roughly in April or May, to a litter of 4 to 8 pups, each weighing about 1 pound. The pups are born in a den, where they will stay for the first 6 to 8 weeks of their life. When the pups are first born they cannot see, hear or maintain warmth and they need constant care from their mother. By to 8 weeks of age, the pups will venture out of the den and begin their life of learning how to be a predator.

Biology: Wolves are superbly constructed and adapted for their particular role in an ecosystem - predators that pursue a large and small prey over different kinds of terrain: open plains, dense forest, deep snow, steep slopes and into the water if need be. Wolves have developed lean, muscular bodies set on long, powerful legs to be able to pursue prey. Wolves are built for endurance and running; they can average around 25 miles per hour for several miles and 35 to 40 miles per hour for short bursts. The wolf's expert hunting ability comes from a combination of speed, stamina and strategy. Because wolves have narrow chests and outward – splayed forelegs, their hind legs can move in the same track as their front legs – an advantage in covering ground efficiently. Wolves' large, well-padded feet help to spread their weight over snow and allows them to efficiently grip irregular surfaces like rocks and logs. The sagittal crest (the bone on the top of the skull) on a wolf is where the jaw muscles are attached. This is well defined on the wolf because of their very powerful jaw. Wolves' jaws produce immense power - a crushing pressure of about 1,500 pounds per square inch (psi), compared with 750 pounds for average large dogs such as German Shepherds. Wolves have 42 teeth specialized for stabbing, shearing and crushing bones. The first four teeth, front and bottom are called incisors and are used for nipping and gnawing meat from the bone. Wolves use their canine teeth, which can grow to be 2 inches in length, for gripping and holding itself to the prey animal. The premolars are used for slicing and grinding. The specialized molars, called carnassials are used for slicing and tearing. The last molars are used for pulverizing and grinding food. Even more extraordinary is a wolf's sense of smell - up to 100,000 times greater than human beings'. Under the right conditions a wolf can smell something up to 300 yards to 1 mile away. Their hearing is excellent also. Under certain conditions, wolves can hear a howl as far as six miles away in the forest and ten miles away on the open tundra.

Wolf Society: The wolf's social system is based on a dominance order, there are two separate dominance orders within each pack, a male order and a female order. If animal A is dominant to B, and B is dominant to C, then A is also dominant to C. There are few equals. The highest-ranking male is referred to as the "alpha male," and the top female is the "alpha female." Besides the alpha pair, there may be three other classes of wolves in well-established packs:

1 - mature subordinate animals,
2 - "outcasts" or "peripheral" wolves, which rank so low that they avoid the main pack members and stay near the fringes of the pack's social center, and
3 - juveniles, which do not become part of the pack nucleus until their second year of age.

Wolf Pack Communication: Just as there can be no order within the pack without communication among members, so too there can be no order within the wolf population without communication among packs. For example, there could be no territories-whether they are spatial or spatial-temporal - If each pack did not know where neighboring packs traveled and when they were in particular areas. However, the range of individual packs is often one hundred square miles or more, so obviously it is not merely the presence of a pack that discourages neighboring packs from using its territory. Some types of communication covering long ranges or lasting for long periods would be necessary to advertise a pack's use of an area. Scent marking. The sense of smell could be very useful in maintaining a territory, and the puzzling phenomenon of scent marking could serve this function. Scent marking was defined by Devra Kleiman in 1966, as "urination, defaecation, or rubbing of certain areas of the body which is:

1 - oriented to specific novel objects,
2 - elicited by familiar conspicuous landmarks and novel objects or odours, and
3 - repeated frequently on the same object."

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