The wolf was first marked in Norway's Østerdalen and last seen in Engerdal in July 2003. Her journey came to an end in northeast Finland, not far from the Russian border.
The distance traveled, around 1,100 kilometers (660 miles) as the crow flies, is reportedly at least 200 kilometers longer than the lengthiest wolf-wandering registered in Montana in the US.
"It's usually the males who wander the longest," Petter Wabakken, a researcher at the College of Hedmark, told newspaper Aftenposten. "We can only speculate how far they can wander when we see this distance."
He and his colleagues are excited over the information they hope to find in the collar the wolf was wearing when she was shot. It contains 4,500 positions stored in a Geographical Positioning System that should reveal all the mythical animal's movements.
The GPS data will also reveal how far the wolf wandered in an hour. That should help provide valuable information regarding how the wolf population can be tracked and managed.
Wabakken said the discovery in northen Finland also indicates that wolves in Norway today can come from as far away as Finland and Russia, not just Sweden, which aims to build up its wolf population.
