Which two naturalists are the 1851 authority for Canis rufus?

The 1851 authority for Canis rufus is Audubon and Bachman.

This authority credits the American naturalists John James Audubon and John Bachman, who described the animal as the red wolf. In zoological nomenclature, an authority citation records the scientist or scientists responsible for formally describing a species, followed by the year of publication. The citation is commonly written “Audubon & Bachman, 1851.”

The red wolf is native to the southeastern United States and is intermediate in size between the coyote and gray wolf. Its scientific placement has been debated for decades. Some taxonomists have treated it as a distinct species, while others have classified it as a gray-wolf subspecies or viewed it as a population shaped by hybridization with coyotes.

That later debate does not change the historical authority attached to the name. “Gray and Miller,” “Merriam and Allen,” and “Nelson and Goldman” are associated with other North American mammal research, but they are not the authors of the 1851 red-wolf description. The authority citation therefore points specifically to Audubon and Bachman.