In fact, they’re so rare that some researchers believe Singers are now extinct in their native habitat of Papua New Guinea.Īside from being rare and thought extinct in the wild, New Guinea singing dogs are pretty unique due to a number of features not found in modern dog breeds. New Guinea singing dogs prefer sparsely populated areas in vast, thickly forested areas, which makes them extremely elusive. New Guinea, the second largest island on Earth, is divided into the independent Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian-controlled West Papua. “Having nuclear DNA gave us the opportunity to look at the genomes of these dogs and figure out what they were and where they came from,” she added. “Our motivations were to see if this population of Highland Wild dogs, which had been identified by a previous expedition in 2016, were, in fact, the rare and supposedly extinct in the wild New Guinea singing dogs,” Elaine Ostrander, National Institute of Health (NIH) Distinguished Investigator and senior author of the paper, told ZME Science. But a new genetic study found that another rare dog breed, the Highland Wild Dog, is essentially the same breed as the New Guinea singing dog, showing that this population isn’t actually extinct in the wild. None have been seen in the wild since the 1970s. It’s believed only 200 to 300 specimens are alive today, all of which are found in conservation centers. The New Guinea singing dog is one of the oldest and rarest dog breeds in the world. Credit: New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation. Photo of a Highland Wild Dog in Indonesia.
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