Few pieces of popular science have been more thoroughly retracted, or more stubbornly persistent, than the dominance hierarchy of wolves.
The model came from studies of captive wolves, unrelated adults confined together, beginning with Rudolph Schenkel's work in a Swiss zoo published in 1947. Unrelated adults forced into proximity do fight for position, and the resulting picture of alphas, betas and omegas was generalised to wild wolves. L. David Mech popularised it in his 1970 book The Wolf, which sold in large numbers and remains in print.
Mech spent much of the rest of his career trying to correct it. Field study of wild packs, his own on Ellesmere Island and others elsewhere, showed that a pack is normally a family: a breeding pair and their offspring of the last few years. The pair leads because they are the parents, not because they fought their way up. There is no alpha to challenge, and dispersal, not combat, is how young wolves acquire status. Mech has publicly asked that the term alpha be dropped and requested that his own book be taken out of print.
The correction matters beyond wolves. The captive-derived model was extensively applied to dogs, producing training methods based on establishing dominance, alpha rolls and similar, which rest on a false premise about a different species. It was also imported into human self-help and management writing, where alpha and beta are now used as though they described something observed in nature.
They do not. The behaviour described was an artefact of captivity, the researcher who spread it spent decades retracting it, and the terminology outlived the science by half a century.