Interesting Dog Factoids in Magazines

The April issue of Smithsonian had a tiny piece about "A Wolf in Dog's Clothing." In North America, wolves come in gray and white, but also black. Stanford University scientists compared the DNA of the black wolves with the DNA of coyotes and dogs and seem to have found that the gene for black coat comes from dogs. They theorize that the wolves interbred with domesticated dogs that came across the Bering Strait on the land bridge with people migrating from Asia more than 10,000 years ago. So in an interesting circle, wolves became domestic dogs and the dogs then brought their genes back to the wolves.
A second piece was in Conservation Northwest, and it detailed a canine service I'm been reading about a lot lately - finding scat. In this particular instance, dogs are being used to find grizzly bear scat for the Cascades Carnivore Connectivity Project. They want to determine the effect of the roads crossing the Cascades on the local grizzly bear population, and the dogs locate the scat for genetic testing, and for hints on where to place hair sample devices and wildlife cameras.