The mysterious, extinct ‘Fuegian dog’ was actually a semi-tame foxThe Extinct Fox-Dog That Helped

The mysterious, extinct ‘Fuegian dog’ was actually a semi-tame fox The culpeo may have been crucial partner for the Indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego

A strange and mysterious extinct dog breed from far southern South America might not have been a dog at all. 

The “Fuegian dogs” that lived with the Indigenous peoples of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago were semi-tame culpeos, foxlike animals native to South America, researchers report. The study, published July 14 in the Journal of Zoology, highlights how humans have repeatedly allied with canids. 

Fuegian dogs lived alongside the Yámana and Selkʼnam people for probably thousands of years, but the first historical accounts of these creatures came from European visitors to the region in the 18th century. The dogs were described as terrierlike and often a monochromatic grayish-tan with bushy tails.

But the biological identity of these dogs was murky. Following the colonization of the Chilean and Argentinian regions of Tierra del Fuego by Europeans and the systematic decimation of Indigenous communities, the Fuegian dogs vanished by the early 20th century, leaving behind only historical accounts, illustrations and a couple of museum specimens.

William Franklin, a wildlife ecologist at Iowa State University in Ames, was studying how the wild ancestors of llamas reached Tierra del Fuego when he became fascinated by the archipelago’s enigmatic canines and the little that was known about them.

Franklin delved into historical artwork, written accounts, archaeological and genetic data as well as details on how the region’s Indigenous people talked about the canines. 

European accounts from the 1800s usually described the dogs as foxlike: sharp-nosed and lacking the spots and patches common in domesticated dogs. 

“There is no [archaeological] evidence to date that there were dogs in the Americas that far south” prior to European colonization, says Erica Hill, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, who was not involved with the research. 

Franklin notes that the most southerly remains belonging to a dog — dated about 870 years ago — are still 1,000 kilometers north of Tierra del Fuego.