The Greenland wolf (taxonomic Latin: Canis lupus orion, Danish: grønlandsulv) is a subspecies of gray wolf that is native to Greenland. Historically, it was heavily persecuted, but today it is fully protected and about 90% of the wolf's range falls within the boundaries of the Northeast Greenland National Park. A recent genomic study has shown that wolves of Ellesmere Island, Canada, likely should be included in the same subspecies, a view also supported by earlier morphological reviews. The entire population is very small, probably about 200 individuals but with significant uncertainty due to its very remote range. Taxonomy and evolution In 1935, the British zoologist Reginald Pocock attributed the subspecies name Canis lupus orion to a specimen from Cape York, northwest Greenland. He also attributed the name Canis lupus arctos (Arctic wolf) to a specimen from Melville Island in the nearby Queen Elizabeth Islands, Canada. Both wolves are recognized as separate subspecies of Canis lupus in the taxonomic authority Mammal Species of the World in 2005. The oldest wolf remains in Greenland date to 7,600 years ago, however they may have been there earlier because their main prey, the caribou, date to 8,900 years ago. Nowak proposed that during the Late Pleistocene two types of wolf evolved in the ice-free north of the Wisconsin glaciation, one in the Peary Land refugium in the far north of Greenland, the other in Alaska. Once the ice receded, the Peary Land wolves spread across Greenland and the Queen Elizabeth Islands. The Alaskan wolves spread to become the northern wolves referred to as Canis lupus arctos. Other wolves from south of the ice sheet would move north to interact with the northern wolves. Other authors have disagreed that the Greenland wolf is a separate subspecies of Canis lupus because its close proximity to the range of the Arctic wolf. One author proposed that the Greenland wolf migrated from Canada by crossing the frozen sea ice between the two regions, and another has documented wolves on the ice when the Nares Strait froze. In 2016, a study based on 582 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA indicated that Greenland wolves belong to one haplotype that had been previously found among other North American wolves, which indicates their female lineage originated from North America. In 2019, a study mapped the entire mitochondrial genome of the Greenland wolf and confirmed that it fell within Canis lupus. In 2018,