New Guinea Singing Dog
The singing dog of New Guinea, also known as the highland dog, was thought to be extinct in the wild for some 50 years. Evidence of the dogs resurfaced recently in the age of camera phones, which captured everything from scat to the animal’s haunting, melodious howl. But its existence in the wild wasn’t confirmed until 2018, when a team of field biologists collected genetic samples from a pack of the canids lurking around a gold mine in the New Guinea highlands.
The singing dog is an ancient lineage of wild dog; they look somewhere between a dingo and a Shiba Inu. The identity of the animals was confirmed in a DNA study that compared the wild dogs’ genetics with captive-bred populations, whose own lineage is getting to a dangerous genetic bottleneck. Conservationists are hoping the newfound wild population can reintroduce some useful genetic diversity into the species.
