has three little branches, and on one branch is the New Guinea singing dog, on another branch is the highland wild dog, and on another branch is the dingo.” “And it turns out that if you have the whole family tree of dogs – every dog on the planet – there's one branch that sticks out beyond it. “The geneticists – Brian Davis from Texas A&M, Elaine Ostrander and Heidi Parker from the National Institutes of Health – examined over 300,000 genes from the captive population and the highland wild dog samples that we brought back, and then they threw some dingoes in there also just because there was some previous research done that they were closely related,” McIntyre says. The “definitive proof,” as McIntyre calls it, of the dogs’ ancestral relationship was obtained during a 2018 trip to New Guinea, when he and his team managed to trap two dogs, collect biological samples in the form of hair, skin, saliva, blood, and tissue, slip on GPS collars, and return them to their point of capture – all in about 20 minutes or so. The New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation's trail cameras captured nearly 150 images of the canids in 2016, prompting a return to the island two years later © James McIntyre/New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation
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