Minnesota Trail Camera Captures Mysterious Canine

Wildlife experts are baffled over the identity for a mysterious wild canine that was photographed on a Minnesota trail camera.

“To us, the animal looks ‘coyote-esque’ but has some dog-like aspects to its appearance (especially its rounded ears),” the Voyageurs Wolf Project, a conservation organization in northern Minnesota, recently posted to X.

The group added that it also had some wolf-like characteristics, such as its “robust snout” that is larger than most of the local coyotes.

According to the New York Post, the project, which operates within the remote Voyageurs National Park on the Canadian border, first caught footage of the unusual animal last winter.

“That canine just doesn’t look like any other coyote we have observed in our area,” they said while acknowledging that it was definitely not a pure-bred wolf.

An early post mentions that it “looks more like eastern coyotes that live in eastern North America.”

“But still the ears just look real funny to us,” it read.

The organization joked that the unusual canine may be “the elusive ‘wyote dog'” — a hybrid of all three.

“Ultimately, we won’t ever know for sure one way or another because the animal just passed through our area in winter and we haven’t seen it on any trail camera since then so we cannot get a genetic sample or anything like that to tell one way or another,” the organization’s Thomas Gable told Forbes.