A raccoon in a trash can. With dexterous childlike hands and cheeky “masks,” raccoons are North America’s ubiquitous backyard bandits. The critters are so comfortable in human environments, in fact, ...

Nearly 40,000 years ago, humanity had its best idea to date: transform the age's apex predator into a sociable and loyal ally. Though early humans largely muddled through the first few thousand years ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Researchers compared thousands of images of raccoons from iNaturalist, a website where users post images of flora and fauna, based ...

Biologists at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock analyzed images of urban and rural raccoons and found that city-dwelling raccoons have noticeably shorter snouts, a classic marker of early ...

Though dogs are so close genetically to wolves that many taxonomists consider them to be a subspecies, most people wouldn’t let a wolf lick their hand as readily as a Shih Tzu. When animals are ...

Cats, dogs and farm animals are what come to mind when we think of domesticated animals. For ages, domestication has been portrayed as a uniquely human accomplishment, where species become domestic ...

A surprising discovery has rewritten how cats become house pets, while unexpected and rapid evolution is making red foxes more like dogs. In short: an animal’s path to domestication is very ...

In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the easiest possible ...