All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome.
And males and females had very similar skull shapes. Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. A fox's habitat greatly affected the shape of its skull, he and his colleagues report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Parsons photographed 57 female and 54 male skulls and identified key features. Urban areas were defined as having buildings, streetlights, and no wooded areas, whereas rural sites were wooded and lacked human development. All were marked with their locations, rural or urban. Some 1500 skulls had been collected from 1971 to 1973 in London and the adjacent countryside, when a fox culling campaign was underway. "They were fearless."Ĭurious to see whether the animals had somehow evolved to suit their urban lifestyle, Parsons examined National Museums Scotland's fox skull collection. "They'd walk by me and stare, as if asking, ‘Why are you looking at me?'" he recalled. A native Canadian and evolutionary biologist at the University of Glasgow, Parsons had already been struck by the number of foxes he regularly saw on Glasgow's streets, particularly in the early morning. The renowned Siberian study immediately came to mind when Kevin Parsons heard about a large collection of red fox skulls at National Museums Scotland. "This is a ‘natural experiment' that is very much in line with what the Russian experiment has found." "I'm not so much surprised as delighted," by this study, says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, who has written about the Russian fox experiment but was not involved with the new work. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication. Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own.
The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark. In a famous ongoing experiment started in 1960, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation.