12 January 2026

In Case You Missed It (ICYMI), this study made a splash in November/December:

A new study from the Univ of Arkansas finds that raccoons living in urban areas are physically changing in response to life around humans—an early step in domestication.

The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.

— Scientific American, 14 Nov 2025: Raccoons are showing early signs of Domestication

Did you know that domesticated mammals have physical traits that set them apart from their wild cousins? “Domestication syndrome” includes whiter or brown patched fur, floppy ears, shorter muzzles, smaller teeth. The image below is a partial table of those traits. (Click the image for a larger version. Click on the image caption to see the complete table.)

Raccoons are not listed in the table but they are making physical strides on their own and might be domesticated some day. At the University of Arkansas researchers viewed thousands of raccoon photos from iNaturalist and found …

We use raccoons as a mammalian model system to test whether exposure to human environments triggers a trait of the domestication syndrome. Our data suggests that urban environments produce reductions in snout length, which are consistent with the domestication syndrome phenotype

— (boldface added) Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories

Shorter snouts!

CP24 in Toronto — where there are so many raccoons that the animal is an unofficial mascot — interviews the study’s author in this video.

For more information, see this article in Scientific American and the original Univ of Arkansas study paper at Spring Nature Link.