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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Omegaz" data-source="post: 2704270" data-attributes="member: 37882">I think it was Konrad Lorenz who speculated that some breeds of domestic dog are not descended from wolves, but from jackals. He based his speculation on the different temperaments and behaviours of the various dog breeds. This is now known to be wrong, and all domestic dog species are known from genetic information to be descended from gray wolves. This doesn't mean that there was some archetypal dog from which all other breeds have decended. Grey wolves were doubtless domesticated on many occasions and in many locations, and through selective breeding gradually morphed in appearance and behaviour.As an example of how easy it is to produce a domestic dog from a wild canine, in one experiment (by Belyaev)it only took 20 years or selective breeding for tameness, to change a silver fox into an animal that behaved like a border collie.BTW I do not cover domestic species in the Bestiary. Given the number of domestic cat and dog species, such an effort would require its own volume.</blockquote>