Information> Canine Facts
The earliest dog-like animals appear in the fossil record about 40 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era. Today, there are 35 living species of canids. This group includes wolves, the coyote, foxes, jackals and the domestic dog.
Dogs are able to see much better in dim light than humans are? This is due to the tapetum lucidum, a light-reflecting layer behind the retina. It functions like a mirror, accounting for the strange shine or glow in a dog's eyes at night.
The worlds heaviest as well as longest dog ever recorded is believed to be an Old English Mastiff named Zorba. In 1989, Zorba weighed 343 lbs and was 8 feet 3 inches long from nose to tail!
The smallest dog in history was a tiny Yorkie from Blackburn, England. At two years of age and fully grown he weighed only 4 ounces- approximately the size of a matchbox.
The oldest reliable age recorded for a dog is 29 years, 5 months for a Queensland 'heeler' called Bluey in Victoria, Australia. The average dog lives to around 15 years of age.
Dogs have been used as guards, hunters, draught animals, eyes for the blind, drug and explosive detectors, rodent controllers- and even weapons! In Roman times and the Middle Ages, mastiffs wearing light armour, carrying spikes and pots of flaming sulphur and resin ran into battle against mounted knights. In World War II the Russians trained dogs to run suicide missions between the tracks of German tanks with mines strapped on their backs.
Dogs can see color but it is not as vivid a color scheme as we see. It is much like our vision at twilight.
Two dogs survived the sinking of Titanic! They escaped on early lifeboats carrying so few people that no one objected. Miss Margaret Hays of New York brought her Pomeranian with her in lifeboat No. 7, while Henry Sleeper Harper of the publishing family boarded boat No. 3 with his Pekinese, Sun Yat Sen.
Updated Jan.12, 2004
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