![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2019\/11\/Three-Dogs-Tails-1000x667.jpg\")
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Dogs wag their tails. It\u2019s how we know they\u2019re happy. But does that behavior separate your best friend from a wolf? Kate Fish thinks it might. And she spent her summer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City gathering data to test her theory.<\/p>\n
Kate Fish ’20 was working as a research assistant for 911±¬ΑΟ anthropology professor Holly Dunsworth a couple years ago when crews cleaning the Ranger Hall attic uncovered a cache of animal skeletons. Fish\u2019s job was to clean the skeletons, identify them, and prepare them for storage. But many of the skeletons were postcranial\u2013meaning they were missing their skulls.<\/p>\n
The easiest way to identify an animal skeleton is by the skull. \u201cIf you have the head of a dog, you know you have a dog. If you have the head of wolf, you know you have a wolf\u2013or a pig, or whatever,\u201d says Dunsworth.<\/p>\n
Among the postcranial skeletons was a canid. Lacking a skull, it was nearly impossible to determine if it was a wild or a domesticated canid. That got Dunsworth and Fish thinking: How else would you identify canid skeletons? What distinguishes wolves and coyotes from domestic dogs?<\/p>\n
\u201cI started thinking about tail-wagging,\u201d says Fish, who\u2019s majoring in biology and anthropology. \u201cWhile wolves do wag their tails, it is not a habitual behavior as it is for domestic dogs, who constantly communicate this way with humans. Habitual tail-wagging could influence the development of the skeleton, just as habitual tennis-playing influences the morphology of the racket-wielding arm.\u201d<\/p>\n Fish identified the muscles involved in tail posture and wagging and where those muscles attach to the skeleton. She designed measurements to compare differences between domestic and wild canids.<\/p>\n Last summer at the American Museum of Natural History, with support from a 911±¬ΑΟ College of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, Fish measured the bones of 87 skeletons from seven canid species; she did similar work the previous summer at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. She\u2019s looked at skeletons large and small\u2013multiple dog breeds and wild canids from wolves to foxes\u2013to make allowances for size. She\u2019s also examined skeletons for signs of osteoarthritis, testing an assumption that domestic dogs could be prone to arthritis from habitual tail wagging.<\/p>\n She is doing preliminary analysis of the data she\u2019s gathered over the past two summers, using Excel to run statistics and create graphs. This fall, she will take a high-level statistics course to learn how to analyze the data using a coding language.<\/p>\n If her theory plays out, Fish, whose interest in skeletons was sparked by the TV series Bones,<\/em> plans to write a research paper and submit it for publication. \u201cI still have a lot of data to analyze,\u201d says Fish, \u201cbut with what I have done so far, I am seeing marginal differences in the bone anatomy that could verify my hypothesis about tail-wagging.\u201d<\/p>\n Fish\u2019s study on postcranial identification could add a new tool for researchers at archaeological sites who find canid skeletons without skulls.<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to the published literature,\u201d says Dunsworth, \u201cKate\u2019s the first person to investigate a link to tail behavior.\u201d \u2022<\/p>\n \u2013 Tony LaRoche ’95<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dogs wag their tails. It\u2019s how we know they\u2019re happy. But does that behavior separate your best friend from a wolf? Kate Fish thinks it might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[161,49,160,159,162],"class_list":["post-2550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2019","tag-anthropology","tag-college-of-arts-and-sciences","tag-holly-dunsworth","tag-kate-fish","tag-tony-laroche","architecture-big-ideas","architecture-currents"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2550"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3155,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions\/3155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Kate](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2019\/11\/Kate-Fish--500x375.jpg\")
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