Even the list of endangered creatures is growing, with reports that some “extinct” species have been found. For the first time in 50 years, an extremely rare old dog breed has been seen in the wild.
Researchers took more than a half-century to uncover the New Guinea singing dog, which was assumed to be extinct in the wild. With just a handful of these dogs kept in captivity, the researchers were taken aback when they discovered them in Papua, Indonesia. Closely linked to dingos, these dogs are known for their distinctive and beautiful howl.
A pack of 15 wild dogs was discovered near a gold mine in 2016 during an expedition led by the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation. The study team returned a few years later to get DNA samples and GPS data from this pack in order to compare it to the captive singing dogs.
They turned revealed to have a genetic overlap of over 70%, indicating that they are extremely closely related.
“They appear to be most closely related to a population of conservation biology New Guinea singing dogs that were descended from eight dogs brought to the United States many, many, many years ago,” said Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute and co-author of the paper.
“Singing dogs in New Guinea are quite unusual. They’re unusual. They have a lovely harmonic vocalization that you won’t find anyplace else in nature, thus losing it as a species is bad. Elaine said, “We don’t want to see this (species) become extinct.”
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