An artist’s concept of Dusicyon avus. Credit...Jorge Blanco
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about domesticated foxes. A paper in the Royal Society Open Science describes evidence that foxes lived among people of early South American communities.
“It appears to have been intentionally buried within this human cemetery,” said Ophélie Lebrasseur, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Oxford and an author of the new study. “It’s a practice that had been suggested before, but to actually find it is a nice surprise.”
According to Dr. Lebrasseur, most archaeological traces of South American canids are usually isolated bones or teeth.But the nearly complete skeleton of a foxlike animal was discovered when archaeologists excavated the Cañada Seca burial site in central Argentina in 1991.