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A cooling, drying climate over the last 40 million years turned North America from a warm and wooded place into the drier, open plains we know today. Dogs are native to North America. The species of the time, fossils show, were small animals that would have looked more like mongooses than any dogs alive today and were well-adapted to that habitat.
Their forelimbs were not specialized for running, retaining the flexibility to grapple with whatever meal unwittingly walked by. A new study shows how dogs evolved in response to those changes, demonstrating that predators are sensitive to climate change because it alters the hunting opportunities in their habitat. At the same time that climate change was opening up the vegetation, dogs were evolving from ambushers to pursuit-pounce predators like modern coyotes or foxes—and ultimately to those dogged, follow-a-caribou-for-a-whole-day pursuers like wolves in the high latitudes.Image credit: Mauricio Anton
