There are wolves that look like dogs, and dogs that appear suspiciously like wolves. For most, this is just a symptom of the fact that dogs are descended from wolves, but for one animal recently found in the wild, its part-wolf part-dog nature is very real.

Wolves (canis lupus) and dogs (canis lupus familiaris) are thought to have diverged sometime between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago, and the ancestor of domestic dogs is likely a long-extinct descendant of gray wolves. The two species are 99.9% genetically identical, and (unlike horses and donkeys) are able to produce fertile offspring if they interbreed because they—along with dogs, wolves, and related canids like dingoes and jackals—have chromosomes that can be divided evenly into pairs.

Wolf-dog hybrids have been controversially bred, but are rare in the wild. Wolves only breed once a year, and even if they encounter a lost or feral dog during that time, they are so territorial that they are more likely to chase or even kill it than allow it into their domain for mating. Still, the fragments of dog ancestry found in more than half of Eurasian wolf genomes show that interbreeding has occurred on its own.

The wild wolf-dog found lurking near Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece, is more evidence.

The hybrid was accidentally discovered in 2025 by Greek wildlife group Callisto during an effort to trap a rogue wolf in nearby Halkidiki. While there have been claims of wolf-dogs on the prowl in Europe, they (along with similar sightings in the U.S. and Central Asia) have mostly been based on looks alone, so any stray that looks even remotely like a wolf could have been identified as a hybrid. When Callisto conducted DNA tests on 50 wolf samples from the Greek mainland, however, they revealed this one individual to be 55% dog and 45% wolf.

Callisto has been tracking the wolf population in Greece, which has been flourishing since the Bern Convention (whose purpose is to study and protect endangered large carnivores like wolves and bears) banned hunting wolves in 1983. At least three packs of around 31 wolves each roam the Mount Parnitha range right outside Athens, and after recently concluding a six-year study on the Greek wolf population, Callisto has determined a total population of 2,075 individuals.

This hybrid creature is not the same phenomenon as Colossal’s attempted de-extinction of the dire wolf—a species that has not walked the Earth in 10,000 years. The biotech company extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf samples and merged it with progenitor cells from existing gray wolves, which can differentiate into different types of tissues. Genes were edited to express every dire wolf trait possible, and the pups were born to surrogate domestic hound mothers.

Some argue that the appearance of a wolf-dog hybrid in the wild is the result of the rising wolf population intermingling with the overflow of stray dogs in Greece. Over 3 million stray dogs and cats are estimated to wander the streets of the country, often relying on restaurant scraps for food. It is possible that one of these dogs ended up in wolf territory, mated with a wolf, and emerged unscathed, with the wolf-dog being the result of that encounter.