Even the endangered animals list get bigger and bigger, apparently some “extinct” species have been rediscovered. This time a very unique ancient dog breed has been spotted in the wild for the first time in 50 years.
It took half a century for researchers to rediscover the New Guinea singing dog – a species thought to be extinct in the wild. With only a few of these dogs living in captivity, the researchers were completely baffled to spotted them in some remote areas of Papua, Indonesia. Closely related to the dingos, these dogs are famous due to their very unique and melodious way to howl.
Back in 2016, during an expedition conducted by the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, a pack of 15 wild dogs has been spotted near a gold mine. A couple of years later, the researching team returned to collect DNA samples and GPS data from this pack in order to compare it with the captive singing dogs. Turns out they had an over 70% genetic overlap – that means they’re incredibly close related.
“They look most 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,” Elaine Ostrander – geneticist at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute and co-author of the paper told CNN.
“New Guinea singing dogs are rare. They’re exotic. They have this beautiful harmonic vocalization that you don’t find anywhere else in nature, so losing that as a species is not a good thing. We don’t want to see this (species) disappear,” Elaine added.
Credits mymodernmet