Unraveling the various mechanisms that facilitate adaptive processes in nature is a pivotal challenge uniting evolutionary biologists, physiologists, ecologists and scientists from many diverse fields. While over the past decades, we have acquired comprehensive knowledge about the physiological, immunological or morphological modifications that allow species to adapt and thrive in natural environments, their underlying genetic mechanisms remain mostly unknown. With recent advances in molecular technologies we are now – for the first time – able to investigate genetic changes that play key-roles in these fundamental evolutionary processes. Moreover, the rapidly growing number of completely sequenced genomes allows us to find and compare variation in genes, which might represent examples of parallel evolution acting in many diverse taxa. Here we present preliminary data investigating the adaptive genetic changes in an unusual, hypometabolic model – the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides). The raccoon dog is the only member of dog-like mammals (family Canidae) that adopts a passive wintering strategies (shallow winter sleep) in order to survive harsh seasonal weather conditions. By doing so, the animal reduces its metabolic rate to a minimum and relies upon its stored energy resources, which it mostly gained before transforming into the hypometabolic state. Vast metabolic changes are required to undergo the physiological fluctuations associated with this wintering strategy and identifying the genetic mechanisms underlying these processes has importance for our understanding of winter sleep and hibernation in endothermic mammals in general. We utilized high-throughput sequencing of the raccoon dog’s transcriptome to identify genes responsible for the species’ unique metabolism. The sampling consisted of normalized cDNA extracted from a pool of diverse tissues such as liver, brain, kidney and fat tissue of one female and one male raccoon dog. The millions of sequenced nucleotides were assembled into approx. 26,000 contigs and mapped against all protein coding genes extracted from the fully sequenced genome of a close relative, the dog. Subsequently, we generated a multispecies alignment of orthologous genes present in seven different species: raccoon dog, dog, three hibernators (bat, hedgehog and squirrel) and two non-hibernating control species (human, cow). We developed a model that utilizes the genetic distances between a quartet of species including one hibernator, the raccoon dog, the dog and a non-hibernating outgroup to identify genes that show more similarity between the raccoon dog and any of the hibernators than to its evolutionary relative the dog. Our model identified a suite of candidates that might play a key-role in metabolic processes facilitating wintering strategies of endothermic mammals and we currently investigate those genes in more depth by means of analyzing the patterns of selection acting upon them and characterizing the causal mutations. Notably, our model is also generally applicable to future projects that aim at testing other traits or genes for signals of parallel evolution.