First studied in 1897, the rare New Guinea “singing dog” exhibits a vocalization pattern like a humpback whale—a long, drawn-out call that’s distinctly different from a dog’s bark or a wolf’s howl. Researchers suspected the singing dog went extinct after going unseen in the wild since the 1970s (there are roughly 200-300 in captivity around the world, however). But new evidence suggests that a pod of “ancestral dogs” found in the Indonesian highlands are the evolution of the lost singing breed. Blood samples determined that this breed and the ancient species do not share an exact genome but researchers believe that they’re so alike that they cannot possibly be separate types of dog, suggesting they did not in fact go extinct but rather wandered to more remote areas. Read more and watch a video of the wild breed at Vice.
Image courtesy of YouTube User Silver Cross Fox