Our recent Conservation Letters paper on dingo ancestry across Australia has been picked up by First Dog on the Moon in a new cartoon for The Guardian, arguing — with the usual deadpan conviction — that Australia’s national animal really ought to be the dingo.

Being lampooned by First Dog is something of a rite of passage for Australian science, and seeing the 88.3%-dingo headline turned into a cartoon panel is by some distance the most satisfying form of impact metric I have encountered this year.

Across much of rural Australia, any free-roaming canine that troubles a flock tends to be filed under a single label: wild dog. The label is administratively tidy, but it hides a question that has divided ecologists, geneticists and managers for decades — how much of the animal in front of you is dingo, and how much is descended from European dogs brought ashore after 1788? Today, in Conservation Letters, we publish a study that finally lets that question be answered cheaply, consistently, and at scale. Our headline result: averaged across more than 300 free-roaming canines sampled around the continent, just 11.7% of the genome comes from domestic dogs. The rest is dingo.