Free Republic

Many people know modern dogs evolved from the grey wolf. But did you know most of the more than 340 modern dog breeds we have today only emerged within the past 200 years? Dogs were first domesticated during the Neolithic period between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, and have been closely linked to humans ever since. Dingoes – the only native Australian dog – are thought to represent a unique event within canine evolution, having arrived in Australia 5,000–8,000 years ago. Yet dingoes' exact place in the evolutionary family tree of dogs has never been known. To find out where...

A BABY girl mauled by her family's pet dingo-cross dog suffered more than 100 bite wounds, a doctor has told an inquest. Twenty-two-month-old Kara Compton's injuries were described by two senior nurses on Tuesday as the most horrific they've seen. Kara was in bed in her family's home at Bunyip, in Victoria's east, when the dog climbed onto her bed and mauled her. She was found by her father and taken by ambulance to Dandenong Hospital, but went into cardiac arrest and died.

Dingo's origins tracked by DNA The dingo may have been introduced on a single occasion to Australia A genetic analysis of the Australian dingo suggests the dogs tagged along on an epic expansion of people out of southern China around 6,000 years ago. An international team claims that dingoes descend from a small group that could have been introduced to Australia in a "single chance event" from Asia. Evidence from mitochondrial DNA suggests that the wild dogs arrived on the continent around 5,000 years ago. The work appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Peter Savolainen of the...