Dog Evolution: The Journey to becoming Man's Best Friend

A long time ago on an all too familiar Early Paleocene group of tree dwelling mammals that were the basal carnivora such as the Miacoidea from which the dog-like Caniformia and the cat-like Feliformia evolved from over the coarse of millions of years.

Early on in Caniform evolution a splinter group evolves away from most Caniforms, these were the Amphicyonidae "Bear Dog" however these creatures were more closely related to true dogs rather than bears. I will cover the Bear Dogs in a future post.

The other Caniform lineages evolved into Canidae (True Dogs) and Arctoidea (Bears and their close relatives) I will go in further detail of this group in a future post.

The basal and earliest form of the canids were the Hesperocyoninae which lived during the Late Eocene and ultimately went extinct in the Middle Miocene when the clade splintered into two new clades: Borophaginae (Bone-Crushing Dogs) and Caninae (Canines).

I will make a future post detailing the Borophaginae later. 

The earliest known basal canine is the Leptocyon which was a small fox-like creature that lived during the Oligocene-Miocene. Its not hard to imagine if the ancestor to all canines were very fox-like around this time.

The Urocyon first evolved in the Pliocene and are one of the few living basal canine alive today, they are known by two extant species: Gray Fox and Island Fox.

The rest of the canines further diverge from these two groups into two clade tribes: Canini and Vulpini.

The Vulpini were small canines that contains the Otocyon (Bat-Eared Fox), Nyctereutes (Raccoon Dog), and Vulpes (True Foxes: Fennec Fox, Blandford's Fox, Cape Fox, Red Fox, Ruppell's Fox, Corsac Fox, Tibetan Sand Fox, Kit Fox, and Arctic Fox)

The Canini ranges from small to large sizes canines that contain two sub-tribes Cerdocyonina and Canina.

Cerdocyonina were a diverse bunch containing the following genera: Speothos (Bush Dog), Chrysocyon (Maned Wolf), Dusicyon (Falkland Island Wolf), Lycalopex (Hoary Fox, Sechuran Fox, Darwin's Fox, Pampas Fox, South American Gray Fox, and Andean Fox), Cerdocyon (Crab Eating Fox), and Atelocynus (Short Eared Dog).

Canina are probably the most famous members of the canine family: Lycoan (African Wild Dogs), Cuon (Dhole), and Canis (Dogs, Gray Wolves, Coyote/American Jackal, African Gray Wolf, Ethiopian Wolf, Eurasian Golden Jackal, Black-Backed Jackal, and Side-Striped Jackal)