Scientists at the National Human Genome Research Institute in the US recently analyzed the DNA from 161 dog breeds to map out how they're all related. The Guardian took that data set and created a fun little interactive tool to let you visualize linkages between doggos.
If you scroll down to about 3/4 down that page, you can see where they've embedded the tool. You can select a breed from a drop-down menu to see how it's related to other breeds, or — what I find more interesting — pick a group of breeds and see all the different ways they link up.
Here's the group linkages for "toy spitz", which contains my personal fave breed, the Pomeranian. (My twitter handle is @pomeranian99, and there's a Ukranian-Canadian farming story behind it, heh.) Anyway, you can that breed's adorable happy little face jutting out slightly at 2 o'clock in the screenshot below.
The linkages surprised me — I didn't know know it was related to the Pug, for example …
Here's the "retriever" group …
… and if you hover over any particular breed, it shows you the level of relatedness between any two breeds, with the numbers getting higher the more related they are …
Tres diverting!
