TSUKUBA, Ibaraki Prefecture--Hinako Komori quickly recognized that a stuffed specimen at a museum storehouse was likely a long-extinct Japanese wolf. But the elementary school girl faced difficulty trying to convince adults of her theory.

It took Komori, now a 13-year-old second-year junior high school student in Tokyo, more than three years to get the science world to confirm the animal was indeed the sixth known specimen of the long-lost wolf.

In November 2020, Komori, a fourth-grader in elementary school, took her first tour of the storage facility of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba. The facility is usually closed to the public.

A specimen on the lowest level of a shelf caught her eye.

“Ah, is this possibly a Japanese wolf?” Komori thought to herself.

The Japanese wolf is a subspecies of the gray wolf, which inhabits wide areas in the Northern Hemisphere. The Japanese variety is said to have lived in mountains on the main islands of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku.

The last known Japanese wolf was caught in 1905 in Higashi-Yoshino, Nara Prefecture.

Komori asked a research staff member about the specimen but could not receive any clear answers because the staffer was not a mammal specialist.

LONG INTEREST IN ANIMALS

Komori started reading illustrated reference books and watching movies of animals after turning 3. She was especially intrigued by extinct species, and she had seen several pictures of the Japanese wolf.

“Those creatures’ unknown features and their strange appearances make them lovely,” Komori explained.

The stuffed specimen at the museum had a short neck, short forelegs and a bushy tail.

“The radar system inside me rang, identifying it as a Japanese wolf,” Komori recalled.

At the time, there were only five confirmed stuffed Japanese wolves in the world, including three stored in Japan. One of them was displayed at the Ueno main hall of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

Komori was so curious about the specimen that she emailed the museum the day after the tour.

A reply came three months later, saying, “The specimen in question is a kind of ‘yamainu’ (mountain dog).”

There are a number of theories about what “yamainu” means. One is that the term has been used for “wolf.”

Komori grew more confident that the specimen was a Japanese wolf and started her own research project to ascertain its identity.

She noted that external characteristics of the specimen were consistent with those of known Japanese wolves, including the flat part between the forehead and the tip of the nose, the long head and the blackish fur at the center of the back.

But she needed more evidence.

Komori turned to the museum’s database for information and found that the animal had previously been kept at Ueno Zoo.

However, there was no data on its origin or how it arrived at the zoo.

She found another document that stated the wolf originated in China. She also found database records that said the the specimen had been disposed of.

Komori amassed other documents and materials from relevant facilities. She spent days going through the fresh information.

She concluded that the specimen was likely a Japanese wolf that had been cared for at Ueno Zoo around 1888.

“The possibility of the sample being a Japanese wolf increased as I examined much more information,” Komori said. “The process made me feel full of energy.”

In February this year, Komori released an academic paper to illustrate her conclusion about the Japanese wolf specimen.

For two years, she worked on the thesis while studying with Shinichiro Kawada, a mammal taxonomy expert at the National Museum of Nature and Science.

“I am happy above all else that I was able to share what I had exclusively known with other members of society,” she said.

Many mysteries remain about the Japanese wolf.

“I will be working hard to uncover the species’ secrets from now,” Komori added.

Kawada summed up the research project.

“This is truly a triumph of curiosity,” he said. “The lesson appears to be that if you carry out careful investigations, you can see things that were formerly invisible to you.”

The National Museum of Nature and Science last year gained more than 900 million yen ($5.7 million) in donations through a crowdfunding campaign to preserve specimens and documents.

The drive’s specialized website emphasized the need to pass down as many specimens as possible to posterity.

Confirmation of the sixth Japanese wolf specimen was possible only because the animal was preserved for a century.

“This research project reaffirms the importance of treating any specimen with care to hand them down to the future generations,” Kawada said.