Where did dogs come from?  The answer is wolves (not foxes). 

Here’s a thought experiment.  Go back 20,000 years and check out the dogs. Yikes! There were no dogs only 20,000 years ago. This 1994 story from Discover is a good starting point to learn about the beginnings of dogs. Another good source is Wikipedia’s article on dogs.  These articles teaches us how incredibly fast morphology and behaviors evolve, mostly through neotony (or see here), evolutions ability to superimpose “young” and often gentler features of animals into an entire population.  Neotony is a way for natural selection to get lots of bang for the buck.

The rapid changes in morphology and behavior are well known to dog breeders, who practice “artificial selection.” Somehow, this artificial slection of intentional animal breeding just doesn’t offend Creationists.  Perhaps it’s because the changes are noticeable even over the course of a human lifetime. “Natural selection” sometimes takes longer, especially in longer-lived species like humans, so it gives anxious Creationists opportunities to let their imaginations run wild (“No! It’s not possible that animals can quickly evolve into other types of animals!”).  They need to think of dogs when they resist learning of natural selection.  The bodies of chihuahuas, collies and mastiffs don’t lie.  Natural selection is immensely powerful and dogs can lead the way for those of use who are afraid to believe. 

Here’s a bit of the Discover article:

We need only compare the number of chromosomes– DNA bundles–in members of the canine family to see that our dogs aren’t descended from foxes: silver foxes have just 36 chromosomes, whereas dogs have 78. Our dogs are derived from gray wolves, which not only also have 78 chromosomes but, more to the point, can still breed with dogs, making them members of the same species. Some 12,000 years ago, judging from archeological remains, these gray wolves loped into the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears and then, over the millennia, gave rise to all the fantastic dog shapes and sizes that populate the planet today.