Its dog-like appearance with a relatively broad head and erect ears, makes the Dingo Australia's largest mammal carnivore. With canine teeth longer than those of a domestic dog, the dingo's muzzle is also longer and tapered.
Get our monthly emails for amazing animals, research insights and museum events. Generally speaking, Dingoes can live in a wide range of habitats found on the Australian mainland. Their preference is woodland and grassland areas that extend to the edge of forests.
They are only limited by access to viable water sources. The introduction of agriculture by early European settlers and the fear of predation of livestock, saw their range reduced. Having been in Australia for around 4, years, Dingoes inhabited many parts of mainland Australia but never reached Tasmania.
After European colonisation and the growth of pastoralisation, there was a concerted effort to remove Dingoes from farming areas. As a result, Dingoes are mostly absent from many parts of New South Wales, Victoria, the south-eastern third of South Australia and from the southern-most tip of Western Australia.
Dingoes are regarded as common throughout the remainder of Australia except in the arid eastern half of Western Australia, nearby parts of South Australia and the Northern Territory. Dingoes are opportunistic carnivores. Mammals form the main part of their diet especially rabbits, kangaroos, wallabies and wombats.
When native species are scarce they are known to hunt domestic animals and farm livestock. This makes them very unpopular with pastoralists. Failing this, the Dingo will eat reptiles and any food source it can find including insects and birds.
Scavenging at night, the Dingo is a solitary hunter but will form larger packs when hunting bigger game. It is thought that the Dingo contributed to the extinction of mainland Thylacines Tasmanian Tiger by becoming competition for the available food sources. Dingoes display a clearly defined territory which is rarely left and often defended against other Dingoes.
However, territory is known to be shared when Dingoes form packs for hunting. Dingoes rarely bark. They tend to howl, particularly at night in an effort to attract pack members or to ward off intruders. Other forms of communication include scent-rubbing, defecating and urinating on objects such as grass tussocks to mark territorial boundaries. Pure Dingoes will breed once a year between March and June.
The gestation period is approximately nine weeks similar to domestic dogs with the resultant litter producing usually between four and six pups. But neither of these observations excludes dingoes from being wild. Read more: Dingoes do bark: why most dingo facts you think you know are wrong.
For example, a relationship with humans does not constitute the rigorous definitions of domestication. Consider the red fox Vulpes vulpes , which was also introduced to Australia by people and are now free-ranging: they are also not considered to be domesticated. Neither are wild animals such as birds that we feed in our backyards domesticated simply because they are sometimes fed by us. In fact, dingoes have been living wild and independently of humans for a very long time — they have a distinct and unique evolutionary past that diverged some 5 to 10 thousand years ago from other canids.
This is more than enough time for the dingo to have evolved into a naturalised predator now integral to maintaining the health of many Australian ecosystems. Read more: Dingo dinners: what's on the menu for Australia's top predator? Dogs do not have the brain power or body adaptations to survive in the wild, and they cannot play the same ecological role as dingoes. From this ecological perspective alone, the two species are not interchangeable. Viewed alone, the overall shape of the body and skull does not easily distinguish wild canids from dogs, mainly because of the sheer diversity among different breeds of domestic dogs.
But there are some important body differences between free-ranging dogs and dingoes, mainly in the skull region as shown here and here. Dingoes and other truly wild canids have some fundamentally unique behaviours that set them apart from dogs although like shape, there are often exceptions among the artificial dog breeds. Advancing our nation. Leading in our region. Transforming our world. The ANU Fund. Alumni ANU graduates become lifelong members of our community.
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New students. Students with a disability. Higher Degree Research candidates. Indigenous students. You are here » Newsroom » All news » Research reveals when dingoes first arrived in Australia. This research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports. For journalists. Media team contact.
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