Dogs have been our closest companions for several millennia now, but they’ve been around for a lot longer. Millions of years longer, in fact. As reported by the University of Michigan, researchers recently took another look at a 30-million-year-old fossil from Oregon and realized they were dealing with one of the most complete early dog skeletons ever discovered.
The fossil was originally dug up back in the late 1980s. Like many archaeological finds, it was then shoved away to gather dust in a museum collection, largely because paleontologists thought it belonged to an oreodont, an extinct creature considered an early relative of several modern animals like sheep, camels, and pigs.
Eventually, further study showed it was actually a Mesocyon coryphaeus, an extinct early canid (aka dog). Previous evidence had only yielded skulls. This specimen yielded more than a skull; it was missing only its tail and portions of its hands and feet. It even contains a baculum, a.k.a. the penis bone dogs today still have.
Scientists Found a Lost Branch of Dog Evolution in an Oregon Museum Collection
The discovery, or, rather, the rediscovery, is important on its own, but it also gives researchers a better idea of how these dogs lived. They were shorter, for one, and a lot stockier. Their bones were thick, meaning they could literally be described as big-boned. Its elbows suggest that it could rotate its forearms, which could have helped it climb or grapple. It also had a prominent big toe.
This was not an ancient Golden Retriever. This was a sturdy dog built to survive the wild.
Eventually, its environment changed, as forests gave way to open woodlands as the climate cooled. This species eventually became an evolutionary midpoint between dogs that climbed trees and those that preferred staying on the ground. That said, you would think Mesocyon was an ancestor of modern dogs. It isn’t. It’s a branch that eventually disappeared, and that’s probably the most interesting part of this fossil’s rediscovery.
It’s evidence that something that just barely shares a link to a modern creature once existed.
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