Animal · Australia
Dingo
Canis lupus dingo — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The dingo is Australia's wild dog, a slim sandy hunter that howls instead of barking and has lived on the continent for thousands of years. It is the largest land predator there.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the dingo live?
Home: Deserts, grasslands and open forests of Australia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Australia.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 60 cm at the shoulder, 1.2 m with the tail. It weighs about 15 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Dingoes came to Australia by boat with seafarers at least 3500 years ago and have lived wild ever since. They hunt alone or in small family packs, taking kangaroos, wallabies, rabbits and lizards, and a pack can bring down prey much larger than a single animal could manage. Instead of barking they howl, often together, and the sound carries for kilometres across the desert at night. Because dingoes also killed sheep, farmers built the Dingo Fence, a wire barrier about 5600 kilometres long that still divides the southeast of the country from the inland. Today the greatest threat is quieter: dingoes and domestic dogs have puppies together, and in many regions few animals are purely dingo any more. On K'gari, the sandy island off Queensland, one of the least mixed populations is still living.
Find it on the globe
Dingo is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is a dingo a dog or a wolf?
A dog, but a wild one. Dingoes descend from early domestic dogs that reached Australia by boat and have lived without people ever since, so researchers still argue whether to count them as their own kind.
Do dingoes bark?
Hardly ever. A dingo mostly howls, whimpers and growls, and howling is how a pack keeps in touch across long distances or tells other packs where its territory begins.
Are dingoes dangerous to people?
Usually they keep away. Problems start where dingoes are fed and lose their shyness, as on K'gari, so visitors are asked to store food safely and never to feed or follow them.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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