If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.
Now, some experts think the earliest canid was a small, weasel-like creature called Prohesperocyon, which first appeared about 36 million years ago in southern Texas.
So while the canines went on with their own set of prey and long-distance hunting strategies, the bone-crushers, once the most dominant of the canids, found themselves struggling for survival.
Now, tens of millions of years ago, some ancestral canid, whether it was Prohesperocyon or someone else, was the predecessor to the first of the three great subfamilies of canids.