April 15, 2014
![](https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/australian_dingo-900x529.jpg)
The dingo was declared as its own species and not a descendant of dogs or wolves.
Image credit: Andrew Gregory/Australian Geographic
The dingo was given its own species status, recognizing that it is not descended from dogs or wolves.
WHEN Australia’s FIRST governor, Arthur Phillip, landed on Australian shores in 1788, he documented the first written physical description of the dingo.
Formalized by German naturalist Friederich Meyer in 1793, this one-paragraph description of Australia’s native canid has remained unchanged since, despite the limited level of detail included.
Until March 2014, when an international team of scientists, including conservation biologist Dr Mike Letnic from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, established a more detailed physical description of genetically pure dingoes.
The research published in the Journal of Zoologyis based on data collected from 69 forensic specimens from before 1900, before dingoes came into contact with domestic dogs.
For the first time in its mysterious history, the purebred dingo has a reference physical description. And it reveals that many of our perceptions of the physical attributes of pure dingoes are wrong.
Yellow dingoes aren’t the only purebred ones
“Common folklore is that pure dingoes are only yellow in color, like most dingoes on Fraser Island,” says Mike. “But that’s simply not true. We have found that dingoes can be tan, dark, black and tan, white or have the sandy coloring typical of German Shepherd dogs.
The outdated description of dingoes means that purebreds may have been eliminated based on a false premise, contributing to their decline.
Often blamed for the loss of livestock, suspected hybrid dingoes have been culled in Australia on the basis that non-yellow colored dingoes are not purebred and therefore not protected.
But when it comes to determining the purity of dingo bloodlines, color is not a reliable characteristic, because non-yellow dingoes existed long before Europeans arrived with their dogs, Mike says. “We showed that all these (color) variations were possible.”
Mike says biodiversity in Australia will be affected by false assumptions about the purity of dingoes. “Dingoes play an important role in maintaining the integrity of our ecosystems,” explains Mike. “It’s not just foxes and cats that are changing ecosystems; it’s also kangaroos and dingoes that help control these numbers.
Dingo with its own species status
The study also resurrected the name Canis Goofy meaning that dingoes should occupy their own place on the evolutionary tree.
Canis Goofy was the scientific name originally proposed by Meyer; However, as scientists struggled to establish exactly how the Dingo came to inhabit Australiaor determine its genetic lineage, other names such as Canis lupus dingo (indicating a link with the wolf – lupus) and Canis familiaris dingo (involving domestication) were used.
“In the 1980s, it became fashionable to treat domestic animals as subspecies of wild species,” says Mike. “The Dingo was recognized as a potential ancestor of the domestic dog, but domestic dogs were previously thought to be descended from wolves, so the problem became really fraught.”
Lyn Watson, a cynologist at the Dingo Discovery and Research Centre, says confusion over the dingo’s scientific name has hampered conservation work. “Domestic dogs have never been seen as susceptible to protection,” she says.
But Lyn hopes that by resurrecting the official scientific name Canis dingo, recognition of the species in Australian law will follow. “In 250 years of Australian history, the dingo has never been so protected,” she says.