Its an open question as to how long humans have interacted with dogs- Is it known how long dogs and wolves have been evolving separately?
202764
*Slipping on in* The dog is a mammal in the order Carnivora. Dogs were first domesticated from wolves at least 17,000 years ago, but perhaps as early as 150,000 years ago based upon recent genetic fossil and DNA evidence though there is doubt about the accuracy of this mitochondrial DNA evidence. In this time, the dog has developed into hundreds of breeds with a great degree of variation.\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog\n\nThere is very little genetic difference between any dog and any wolf, coyote, or jackal, etc., so little, in fact, that genetic tests cannot tell how much wolf is in deliberately bred wolf-dogs. The domesticated canines and their wild cousins CAN interbreed.\n\nThe biggest difference is that dogs are domesticated, and wolves are wild animals. What that means is that dogs can be good pets and companions, while wolves are still wild and not suited to living with people. Because they are related, there are a lot of similarities, but wolves represent one end of the spectrum and domestic dogs the other.\n\nWolves are generally bigger and considerably more intelligent than dogs. They are certainly more aware of their environment than dogs, and respond to other animals and humans differently. Wolves don't bond with humans readily the way dogs will. Wolves have a complex pack structure that dogs don't, even when they go feral and pack up. Wolves are constantly testing each other's dominance, while dogs generally accept whatever established hierarchy they live in.\n\nWolves are active and able hunters, while many dog breeds have lost that talent. Wolves are stronger than dogs. Wolves pace, dogs trot. Dogs can be trained, wolves can't (with possible rare exceptions on both sides). In a wolf pack, only the alphas lift their legs to pee (even the alpha female will do this, though not necessarily all the time), and other pack members squat. The alphas will also prevent any other pack members from breeding, and when the pups are born, the whole pack helps raise them. Wolves mate for life (except rare occasions), dogs do not. Dogs go into heat twice a year, wolves only once a year.\n\nWolves are different from dogs by their skull's characteristics, especially the orbital angle, which is the angle between the top of the skull and the side of the skull at the eye socket. This angle is larger (53 degrees or more) in dogs and smaller (45 degrees or less) in wolves. Wolves also have a third larger brain than dogs. Dogs' teeth are smaller, their muzzle is shorter and broader, and their foreheads are broader. Dog's ears are generally more pointed and longer, while wolves' are shorter, wider, and more rounded. Wolves' feet are much larger and more splayed than dogs'. Wolves have a narrower chest and longer, thinner legs. Dogs lack the scent glands, called precaudal glands, underneath the base of the tail.\n\nFor even the most wolf-like dogs, there is a distinct difference in coloration. The colors are much more contrasted and not well-blended on the dog, whereas the wolf's coloration is not contrasted as much and well blended to produce many shades and colors.\n\nWolves are fascinating creatures but they aren't just big dogs. While they are the same genus as dogs (canis) they are a different species: the wolf is canis lupus, the dog is canis familiaris.\nhttp://www.answerbag.com/q_view.php/39319\nhttp://www.lioncrusher.com/animal.asp?animal=35&page=4
548119
You are quite right, similar contraditiction comes up when you compare monkeys with fish, and fish, fish with worms and worms with bacteria.\n\nBetter yet, compare a St.Bernard with  a Toy Terrier - one is 10 times larger than another, no way they could have evolved from a common ancestor.
145713
They already are considered different species--even though they *are* genetically compatible (i.e., the hybrid is not sterile).  Some people believe that wolves and dogs are in the process of speciation--that is, they are becoming separate species, but haven't completely diverged yet.  Wolf-dog hybrids don't occur very often in nature because they have different social and mating patterns.  Nevertheless, if you stick a male and a female in heat together in a cage, eventually they're going to do it.
33597
There have been a lot of new animals found in the forests of Indonesia.  Here's a story I found on it. Enjoy.\n\nhttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060207/ap_on_sc/indonesia_new_species
31349
Probably not.  However, it is not - contrary to popular belief - uncommon for us to find mamals, sometimes large mamals, of a new species even to this day.  Case in point, although Homo sapiens (human beings) were long considered to be the only surving species of the Homo genus, many scientists are taking southeast Asian stories of 'harry little cave dwelling men' seriously and now some believe that an entire seperate species of the Homo genus may have been coexisting with humans as late as the 17th century in some places. So it is possible for large animals to go simply undedected.
129626
I wrote something on this.\n\nYes, there are almost guarenteed more species out of this world.  Heck, there might be some in our own solar system, on the icy moon of europa, or even a gas giant.  THe conditions are harsh, but certain animals adapt certain ways.  I have seen pictures of what some jupitur animals would look like.  Its safe to say, Yes
567367
Your question doesn't make sense.  You are choosing behaviors that are dog behaviors and then asking why they are unique.  Different species have different behaviors.  There are things that humans do that no other animal does too.
60596
*Pondering* Yes there are female ones just as perhaps up to 50% of packs are lead by a female Alpha. Little is known about lone wolves or ronin wolves (as named in popular culture). The proverbial "lone wolf" is the runt, the outsider, ostracized from the pack. This wolf may wander ten kilometers (six miles) or 1000 kilometers (600 miles), passing cautiously through the domains of other packs, If it is very lucky and finds a mate, and if there is enough territory available for them, they might be able to start a new pack of their own.\nIn large packs of wolves, there is often a lowest-ranking member who becomes the focus of the pack's social aggression. Referred to by behaviorists as the "omega" wolf, this animal seems to be a scapegoat and may actually become an outright outcast.\nLone wolves have no social territory and rarely scent-mark or howl.\nThe reasons a wolf may leave a pack (besides the above), include the base fact that packs are relatively small (8-15) and members do break away to either form or be adopted into another pack, loss of Alpha social status, growing old and unable to fullfill the needs of the pack (wolves do not eat their own, if one is old they are turned out to live or die as they may).
434074
It takes millions of years for evolution to take place. So even though it seems like your experiment should work and the animals should adapt to their surroundings...it wouldn't. Not for many, many generations at least. Do some research on mammoth evolution, or even evolution and general, and you'll find the flaws in your idea.
123773
First, you need to define evolution.  You're talking about micro evolution which has no problems with Christianity.  When you start getting into macro, stellar, cosmic and chemical evolution, we've got problems.\n\nIf the ebola virus evolved, it evolved from another virus.  That is micro evolution.  Macro evolution says that that process is evidence that a virus can turn into a dog over time.  This is where you're getting into religious faith and not science.  \n\nThere are hundereds of different breeds of dogs to include wolves and foxes, etc.  Micro evolution says that all those breeds of dogs came from a common ancestor...a dog.  Again, no problem with Christianity.\nMacro evolution will say that the dogs, cats, birds, snakes, plants, blah, blah, all came from a common ancestor.  That's ludicrous and severely contradicts the bible.\n\nNow, as far as your question about before the fall of man...\nGod told Adam that if they ate of the fruit, they would die.  We know that they didn't drop dead on the spot, so what did He mean?  He meant that they would change world events to bring death into the world.\n\nThe world event that possibly changed all of this was the flood.  When man knowingly was sinful (because of Adam), God had to destroy the world (death from the sin of Adam).  Before the flood, the earth had much different living conditions than we do today.  There was the protective canopy of water around the earth that made it paradise.  It increased the oxygen and air pressure to double, it blocked UV rays and had many other benefits.  This is how people were able to live to be 900 years old.\nIt's possible that viruses and other diseases started forming after that protective canopy was gone.  Add in man's industrial chemicals and we've got a recipe for disaster.\nThere was research done with poisonous snakes.  They put the snakes in a hyperbaric chamber and pumped the air pressure to double.  The snakes came out non-poisonous.  How was the world before the flood?  We can't know for sure, but some amazing scientific research has been done on this topic.\n\nAnother possibility is that many viruses were always there, but was just recently released because we went into the rain forest and started cutting down trees.  If it was locked in its environment before and we released it, then it didn't evolve, it was discovered.\n\nYou should check out www.drdino.com and download the seminar titled "The garden of Eden".  It will explain these things in much greater detail.
7794
Hmm... I'm not so sure I agree - I've seen at least two questions today related to dogs bodily functions. It even has the word *gasp* ... poop.
110010
Hey try this site from the BBC. It might be a little too in depth for you but the first page is a good introduction and page 5 gives a good example on how horses have evolved.\n\nhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/biology/variationandinheritance/3evolutionrev2.shtml
450220
What a cool project!  So to answer one of your questions, the crucial distinction among your phyla will be whether or not they're chordates -- which of course includes the vertebrates (but also some invertebrates such as sea squirts and certain worms).  \n\nSo your bipedal wolf (I'm assuming the missing d was a typo, but if "bipeal" is a word from your universe, please let me know) would be phylum chordata, class vertebrata, order mammalia, family canidae, genus canus, species lupus bipedalis (and I'm envisioning something like a cross between Lawrence Talbot and Speaker-to-Animals, without retractible claws).  But that's just off the top of my head.\n\nOne thing I've discussed with my ten-year-old son is the absence of hexapod vertebrates -- e.g. flying horses, winged dragons, etc.  If you were closer, I'd invite you over for coffee and an all-day discussion of where to classify them, and how they evolved.  Since all terrestrial vertebrates have essentially the same structure, it's clear they all shared a common ancestor which makes hexapodal vertebrates, sadly, impossible in our known universe -- so was there a hexapodal (imaginary) marine vertebrate who also scuttled across the floors of silent seas before crawling out of the surf and saying "Hey, the carcharodons can't get me here!  Kewl!"?  ...Which of course suggests all sorts of hexapodal marine vertebrates that shared the same skeletal architecture.  Ooooh, fun.\n\nAnd the final question... so zoology is the study of animals.  There's also cryptozoology, which I've described flippantly as "the study of imaginary animals."  But of course, it's more technically the study of animals that may or may not exist.  So what would we call your zoology, which is the study of animals you've intentionally invented?  Oh, of course, poeiazoology (-poeia, meaing to construct -- as in mythopoeia, the term Tolkien invented to describe the invention of mythologies.)\n\nAnd on that note, elen sila lumen omentielvo!
409747
1. The species of plants and animals have changed over the ages. We don't agree. God made every animal, and people, in six days. Breeds, like German Shepard dogs, and such, were formed later, but most of those were bred by humans.\n\n2. There was no "archaic" species\n\n3. Since there was no "archaic" species, there could be no change from it.
118045
*Chuckling for I believe I have read that book too* Kittycats has it mostly right, but "At birth, wolf pups tend to have darker fur and blue eyes that typically change to a yellow-gold or orange color when the pups are 8-16 weeks old. Though extremely unusual, it is possible for an adult wolf to retain its blue-colored eyes." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf\n\nSo rather rare, but still a possibility...
606555
The chimpanzee became "so intelligent" the same way humans did; isolated populations of chimps devised ways of dominating their environment, and by selective "partitioning" of the smarter population eventually separated themselves from their ancestors (a group of earlier apes that you and I have in common with the chimps).\n\nSharks have not evolved to be any smarter because they began with less raw material.  A shark is a fish.  What do they teach in school these days?  It is not impossible that in a few million years, sharks will evolve into something smarter, but it is unlikely because something is already dominating that opportunity.
6546
Yes.According to some.Dogs and some other animals have been seen behaving strangely in case of a supenatural event,Or before tsunamis and other such stuff. Maybe loss of our kind of intelligence is compensated for by this kind of senses.