William Howard McCarley

McCarley was an Austin College alumnus, professor, and chair of its Biology Department. He studied the distribution and variation of mammals in the south-central United States, and was particularly interested in the red wolf. In his 1962 study of canid skulls taken in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, he showed that red wolves were hybridizing with coyotes, and that pure wolf specimens were only surviving in small, isolated pockets in extreme southeastern Texas and nearby coastal Louisiana. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relied on McCarley’s research in its decision to list the red wolf as endangered in 1967, to trap them (1973-80), and to then put the remnant full-blooded wolves into a captive breeding program for propagation and later release.