The New Guinea Singing Dog — a dog that has its own distinct howl — was believed to be extinct around the world. But scientists said they have found the dogs still living.
What happened:
Scientists recently published new research that showed the New Guinea Singing Dogs still live in Papua New Guinea.
- The study said the species hadn’t been seen in their natural surroundings for five decades.
- Researchers compared DNA from a group of highland dogs to 16 singing dogs, 25 dingos and 1,000 dogs form 161 other breeds.
- The research found that the DNA from the singing dogs and the highland dogs were so similar that they had to be connected.
How it happened
James McIntyre, president of the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, started to search for the dogs on the island back in 1996.
- In 2012, an ecotourism guide snapped a photo of a wild dog in the highlands of the island.
- “The locals called them the Highland wild dog,” he told The New York Times. “The New Guinea Singing Dog was the name developed by Caucasians. Because I didn’t know what they were, I just called them the Highland wild dogs.”
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In 2018, he went back to the island and got some DNA off of two trapped wild dogs.
- He brought it back to researchers “who concluded that the highland dogs Mr. McIntyre found are not village dogs, but appear to belong to the ancestral line from which the singing dogs descended,” according to The New York Times.