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The New Guinea Song Dog is an extremely rare breed that is best known for its unique barks and howls, writes CNN.
The dog can make sounds compared to a humpback whale.
Only about 200 of those song dogs live in captivity. They are descendants of some wild dogs captured in the 1970s.
The animals are highly inbred due to the lack of new genes.
Expedition
Singing dogs have not been observed in their natural habitat for half a century, until 2016, when an expedition located and studied 15 wild dogs in the remote highlands of western Guinea, known as Papua, Indonesia.
A new expedition returned there in 2018 to collect detailed biological samples to confirm whether these wild highland dogs are indeed the predecessors to captive songdogs.
A comparison of DNA extracted from blood drawn from three of the dogs suggests that they have very similar genomic sequences and are much more closely linked than any other dog, according to research published Monday in the journal PNAS.
Wild dogs had a 70 percent genetic overlap with the captive population.
New Guinea is the second largest island in the world. The eastern half is Papua New Guinea, while the western half is part of Indonesia and is known as Papua.
Findings in height
The rare dogs were first described after being found at an altitude of about 2,100 meters in the central province of Papua New Guinea in 1897, according to a recent study.
Despite anecdotal reports and unconfirmed photographs in recent years, many feared that the New Guinea wild dog had been exterminated by habitat loss and mixing with village wild dogs.
This was not the case, and the dogs were rediscovered in 2016 near the Grasberg copper and gold mine in Papua, where measures to protect the ecosystem around the mine had inadvertently created a sanctuary where wild dogs could thrive.
According to the San Diego Zoo, the singing dog’s joints and spine are extremely flexible. Climb and jump like a cat, writes CNN.
The zoo further says that ultrasounds have shown that this dog’s unique cry resembles the song of a humpback whale.
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