Polynesian Dog- — Luomala 
219 
fers "widely in its characters from the dogs of 
certain other Pacific islands" that are not named. 
The peculiarities are that the palate has a back- 
ward prolongation behind the last molar tooth; 
the supraorbital processes are pointed in form 
(the dingo s were "swollen," and appeared con- 
vex on the upper surface), "flat to concave on 
the upper surface, and singularly vulpine in 
character,” and the sagittal crest "is formed by 
a coalescence of the temporal ridges in the re- 
gion of the coronary suture in both specimens, 
and ... is extremely prominent in its caudal 
extremity where it joins the well marked nuchal 
crest." Wood- Jones (1929: 331) quotes, per- 
haps from a letter from the museum director, 
a more detailed description of the colors of two 
skins that have apparently been preserved; one 
is black and white, with black dominant; the 
other is "Ridgway’s russet. . . .” 
Wood-Jones, it will be noted, finds something 
foxlike about this breed. This suggests that those 
early Europeans who called the native dogs of 
the Pacific "foxlike” were not influenced to do 
so by theories of the day that some breeds of 
dogs were derived from a fox ancestor. 
The trail of the dog goes, of course, farther 
west than New Guinea. Interestingly, some 
writers on Indonesian dogs note oblique eyes 
among them or find traits that recall to them the 
dingo. Northward in Micronesia, where the dog 
was spottily distributed at the time of Euro- 
pean discovery, there are many problems that 
also show that to learn more about the Poly- 
nesian dogs the entire South Pacific must be 
studied. In this paper I shall ignore Micronesia, 
however, and turn to the Hawaiian dog. 
FIG. 21. An Australian dingo (Phillip, 1789 : pi. 
45). 
TWENTIETH-CENTURY STUDIES OF THE 
HAWAIIAN DOG 
Few attempts to classify the Hawaiian dog 
have been made in the present century. Two 
zoological surveys (Sharp, 1913, I: 465; Bryan, 
1915: 295) venture no description or classifica- 
tion. S. W. Tinker (1938: 84-87) gives no 
references but labels the dog Cams domesticus 
hawaiiensis. Like Bryan, he mentions the pres- 
ence of color types distinguished by Hawaiians 
and probably follows David Malo (1951: 37) 
and references to dogs in native traditions and 
in Hawaiian-language newspapers. Tinker de- 
scribes the colors as ranging from white through 
all of the yellowish and reddish shades to brown, 
with the lighter shades seemingly most numer- 
ous. The rest of Tinker’s account seems to be 
derived from King and Wood-Jones. D. H. 
Johnson (1944: 334, 335), who does not de- 
scribe but lists both the New Zealand and the 
Hawaiian dog as Cams familiaris Linnaeus, 
merely remarks that it was a domestic dog of 
Asiatic origin which Polynesians had purposely 
carried with them on their migrations. 
Neither of the two major modern scientific 
studies of the physical traits of the Hawaiian 
dog gives any classification. However, they will 
be summarized because they point in the direc- 
tion of our only hope now of learning more 
about the native dog. 
Wood-Jones (1931) describes two crania of 
dogs believed to be possibly of the pre-European 
type, as they were obtained from Hawaiian 
archeological sites. Examination of the skulls 
reveals that although the cranial characteristics 
of the Hawaiian dog had greatly altered through 
a soft vegetable diet, the teeth had retained their 
primitive trait of large size. The relatively great 
length of the upper carnassial tooth is particu- 
larly noteworthy. This primitive trait recalls the 
New Guinea and Australian breeds. However, 
the Hawaiian canine skulls vary in many details 
from these western forms. 
Wood-Jones writes, "The most conspicuous 
feature of the skull of the Hawaiian dog is the 
rounded and smooth contour of all parts of the 
cranium. The temporal lines are hardly visible; 
they are separated by an interval of nearly 30 
mm. at the vertex, and the skull is therefore 
entirely devoid of a sagittal crest. The supra- 
