The study undertaken by Dr Garamszegi and his colleagues is the first to take a comprehensive look at the brain sizes of different dog breeds — and took several decades to complete as the team collected skulls to analyse via CT scan.
Paper co-author and evolutionary biologist Professor Niclas Kolm of Stockholm University said: “Different dog breeds live in varying levels of social complexity and perform complex tasks, which likely require a larger brain capacity.
“Therefore, we hypothesised that the selective pressures on the brain can vary within the dog species, and we may find differences in brain size among breeds based on the takes they perform or their genetic distance from wolves.”
Based on the CT images, team member and veterinarian Dr Kálmán Czeibert reconstructed the brain sizes of each of the collected dog skulls, and determined the organs’ volumes.
His estimations were verified using data from the Canine Brain and Tissue Bank — a facility which the Eötvös Loránd University has been operating for the last seven years.
In total, the researchers accumulated data on 865 individual animals representing 159 dog breeds, alongside 48 specimens from wolves for the sake of comparison.
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