Curator

Vertebrate Paleontology

The Origin and Evolution of the Dog Family

In collaboration with my colleague Dr. Richard Tedford at the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and funded by the National Science Foundation, we are working on several projects on extinct fossil dogs, the family Canidae (ancestral wolves, coyotes, foxes, etc.). The project is aimed at resolving the genealogical relationships among a diverse group of fossil canids in the middle through late Tertiary (approximately 34 to 2 million years ago) of North America. These fossil "dogs" play an important role as top predators of their time, and many had similar adaptations as living hyenas. The Frick Collections at the American Museum of Natural History has the best collection of fossil canids, and much of these were previously unknown to science. Using a modern method called cladistics and with the help of sophisticated computer programs, we attempt to decipher the evolutionary relationships among the extinct dogs. We will then place their geological and geographical occurrences under this new evolutionary framework and search for their paleoenvironmental implications.

Related links:

- Order information about my book "Dogs: their fossil relatives & evolutionary history."

- An excerpt of above book published in Natural History Magazine.

- Download PDF version of above magazine article.

- Listen to an interview with Natural History's editor Vittorio Maestro.

- Read about an interview featured in Columbia University Press web site.

- Blog with the author about this book.

- Read about an article by Kristin Friedrich introducing this book.

	Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives & Evolutionary History, a book on the biology, fossil history, and evolutionary relationship of Canidae with rich illustrations by Xiaoming Wang, Richard H. Tedford, and Mauricio Anton. For the first time, the entire history of the dog family Canidae will be treated. This semi-popular book is published by Columbia University Press in July 2008. To order or for more information, go to Columbia University Press. Read a featured story published in the Natural History Magazine or download a PDF version.  Listen to an interview with Vittorio Maesttro of the Natural History Magazine.  Also read a brief discussion about this book by Kristin Friedrich in the Naturalist magazine.
	Here is an example of an evolutionary tree of all major groups of canids in North America. Numbers to the left are millions of years from the present time. This figure shows that there are three major radiations during the history of the canids and many more extinct canids than is present today.
	Artist reconstruction of an Epicyon by putting layers of muscles on top of skeleton. This Epicyon lived about 10 million years ago in much of the western North America and is the size of a large wolf. Reproduction by permission from Mauricion Anton.
	A complete revision of the systematics and phylogeny of the first two subfamilies, Hesperocyoninae and Borophaginae, are now published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History nnumbers 221 and 243. These can be downloaded from my website.
	For a summary paper on the evolutionary history of canids, I suggest a chapter in a recent book in Oxford University Press (Wang, X., R. H. Tedford, B. Van Valkenburgh, and R. K. Wayne. 2004. Chapter 2 Ancestry: Evolutionary history, molecular systematics, and evolutionary ecology of Canidae, pp. 39-54. In D. W. MacDonald and C. Sillero-Zubiri (eds.), The Biology and Conservation of Wild Canids. Oxford University Press, Oxford). This chapter can be downloaded from my publications site.
	A third volume on the systematics and phylogeny of the subfamily Caninae by Tedford, Wang, and Taylor is currently in press, and will be published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in late 2008 or early 2009. Image to the right is a skull of Canis armbrusteri, an ancestral species of the dire wolf.
	See a video clip about our dire wolf exhibit.
	See also Epicyon from our fieldwork in Red Rock Canyon, Mojave Desert, California.	See also my page on Dogs! Wolf, Myth, Hero & Friend exhibit by Natural History Museun of Los Angeles.