I have been watching the dog show lately and have been reading up on dog breeds and dogs on wikipedia. I seem to be a little confused maybe you guys can help me out here. Wikipedia mentioned that dog breeds are not considered subspecies by the scientific community and are the same thing about race in humans. Ok i get that so does that also mean that every dog breed has the same fancy scientific name? Caninis Maximous or whatever it would be? Since all dogs are of the same species that means that each one can interbred correct? Assume it is by artificial means to take away the different size issues. If this is true that what is the one dog that all these other dogs descended from and would this modern dogs be able to breed with this original dog?
Since modern dogs are fully able to interbreed with wolves, they would certainly be able to interbreed with the first domestic dogs of ~10,000 years ago.
The different breeds of dogs aren’t considered subspecies because dogs are actually LESS genetically variable than wolves. The large variety of shapes, sizes, and colors of the different dog breeds are actually controlled by only a few genes. So all dogs are one subspecies of wolves, Canis lupus familiaris.
Note that “subspecies” is a fairly vague term. But no matter how you look at it, dog breeds aren’t subspecies. And neither are human races, all modern humans are members of the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.
The original dog is the wolf, Canis lupus. Modern dogs can and do breed with wolves, under the right circumstances, and you’ll often hear of folks owning wolf-dog crossbreeds.
Current scientific practice is to consider domesticated animals to be the same species as their nearest wild ancestor, since the most commonly used definition of “species” is based on whether the animals interbreed in nature, and “in nature” is a meaningless term for a population that owes its entire existence to humans. So all dogs are considered to be the same species as wolves, just a different subspecies: Canis lupus familaris.