Animal · Canada, United States, Russia
Wolverine
Gulo gulo — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The wolverine is the largest land member of the weasel family, a stocky animal the size of a small dog with remarkable strength for its build. It lives alone in the snowy north and often feeds on what wolves leave behind.
Picture credit: Susanne Nilsson (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the wolverine live?
Home: Northern forests and mountain tundra of the far north.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Canada, the United States, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 65-109 cm long, plus a 17-26 cm tail. It weighs about 13 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A wolverine spends its life walking. A single male may patrol more than 600 square kilometres, crossing mountains and frozen rivers in search of food, and it can travel for days without resting properly. Most of what it eats is carrion, often the remains of a reindeer or moose killed by wolves, and its jaws are strong enough to crack frozen bone and eat the marrow inside. Its fur hardly collects frost, which is why northern peoples used it to trim the hoods of parkas. Broad paws work like snowshoes and let it run over deep snow where heavier animals sink. Females dig their dens in snowdrifts in late winter, so where the snow melts too early, the young have nowhere safe to grow up.
Find it on the globe
Wolverine is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How strong is a wolverine?
Very strong for an animal of 13 kilograms. Its jaws and thick skull let it crack frozen bones that a much bigger predator would leave, and it can drag a carcass heavier than itself across the snow.
Where do wolverines live?
In the cold north of the world: Canada, Alaska, northern Scandinavia and Siberia. They need long, snowy winters, so they have disappeared from most of the warmer places where they once lived.
Are wolverines dangerous to people?
Not really. They live where almost nobody lives and keep well out of the way, so meetings are rare. A wolverine will defend a carcass it has claimed, but it has no reason to look for trouble with a human.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
Last checked: