A dingo for the modern age?

A project undertaken at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, and supervised by Matthew Crowther

Restoring the ecological role of top predators is an urgent global issue for biodiversity conservation. Recent research shows that dingoes, Australia's largest terrestrial predator, have beneficial effects for biodiversity conservation by dampening the impacts of invasive predators. Despite these benefits, dingoes have ambiguous status. Dingoes have only been in Australia for <5000 years, are a pest because they kill livestock and are subject to extermination programs, but are considered by some laws and many people to be a native species. Their status is also clouded by hybridization with feral dogs and confusion about how to distinguish 'pure' dingoes from dog-dingo hybrids. The lack of an adequate species description hampers efforts to identify and conserve populations of dingoes and prevents development of clear policies for their management. We will resolve the taxonomic status of dingoes through the comparative study of pre-20th century and modern specimens. Because hybridisation between dingoes and dogs has occurred throughout the period of European settlement, the best available reference materials available to define dingoes are specimens from archaeological and sub-fossil deposits that pre-date European settlement. The next best materials are specimens that were collected in the 18th and 19th centuries from the fringes of European settlement where there were few opportunities for dogs to inter-breed with dingoes. The aims of this project aret o compare prehistoric, and pre-20th century material to modern wild canids in Australia, to quantify the morphological (external and skeletal) variation of dingoes and wild dogs throughout Australia, disentangling hybridisation from geographical variation, to reassess the pelt colour variation in dingoes and their hybrids., to assist studies of prehistory with respect to the unresolved question of the introduction of the dingo and the resulting implications for human migration routes to the continent and to provide advice for conservation and pest control agencies on the taxonomic identity of wild canids.