Discoveries Made During the Grey Wolves Skull

In a report written by Blaire Van Valkenburgh, who is a biologist at UCLA that spent more than 3 decades studying the grey wolves’ skull, it is revealed that the increase of wolves in areas is dangerous because their food resources are decreasing. ( Because she studied the skull specifically, Valkenburgh and was able to note that heavily populated wolf areas often resulted in the wolves having more broken teeth since they had to eat a larger percentage of the body because competition for prey was high.

Studying tooth fractures has also shown Valkenburgh that this competition is not a modern day problem, and that it actually used to be a lot worse. The competition within the large predatory animals community was way more intense and fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits show that broken teeth was extremely common in large animals.

While studying tooth fractures has revealed a lot of information, there is still a lot of research that needs to be conducted. While researchers like Valkenburgh are working hard to preserve animals, they cannot do all the work by themselves. Action needs to be taken by taken by political leaders, whether that be donating money to places in charge of research being conducted or keeping the public informed. Finding patterns like tooth fractures is just the start to something bigger, and action is needed if we are going to save animals from extinction.

This article is interesting because it shows that even small details like broken teeth in large animals, can help save the animal from extinction. Researchers can see if the problem is linked to a passed problem of a similar extinct species, in this case a saber tooth tiger, figure out why it is occurring and if it is worth getting concerned about. It is a distressing than they can find a solution to stop it from becoming worse. This article is interesting because it gives us hope that there is someone out there trying to fix to save animals from another mass extinction.

Research and discoveries like this are extremely important to environmental science because they can stop an extinction before it happens. Extinctions are dangerous because losing an animal can completely ruin the balance of an ecosystem. If the elk population were to disappear, than the once increasing population of the grey wolf would disappear unless they found a new food source, which would then disrupt the balance of another. Discoveries like these are crucial to the survival of many different species, because without one population, another can’t survive.