Likely Kicked by a Kangaroo, This Dingo Healed a Millennium Ago Thanks to Help From an Aboriginal Community That Continued to Honor It for 500 Years

New research shows how the ancestors of the Barkindji people in Australia ritually added river mussel shells to a burial site for centuries after the dingo died, suggesting they cared for it deeply

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

May 19, 2026 5:06 p.m.

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Archaeologists in Australia unearthed the remains of a nearly 1000-year-old dingo that appears to have been buried with care and “fed” river mussel shells for roughly five centuries after it died.

The discovery suggests the animal was important to the ancestors of the Barkindji people, who “loved a dingo enough to bury him like family” and maintained the grave for numerous generations, writes Robyn Wuth for the National Indigenous Times.

The practice of adding shells to the site was “a way of keeping connection and also respecting the ancestors,” David Doyle, a Barkindji custodian involved in the research, tells the Guardian’s Donna Lu, adding that some Barkindji people still carry the dingo as their totem because of the animal’s significance.

Researchers describe their findings in a new paper published in the journal Australian Archaeology.

The burial is located in Kinchega National Park along the Darling River in New South Wales. It was first discovered in the eroding face of a road cut approximately 25 years ago by Uncle Badger Bates, a Barkindji elder, and Dan Witter, an archaeologist with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Working in collaboration with Barkindji custodians, archaeologists recently excavated and examined the remains at the request of the Menindee Aboriginal Elders Council.

“The dingo skull had eroded away since it was first identified in the early 2000s, and so the Elders Council felt it was very important to conserve the rest of the skeleton by working with archaeologists, before it too was lost to time and floods,” study co-author Amy Way, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, writes in an email to Live Science’s Sascha Pare.

Their investigation revealed the dingo—known as “garli” in the Barkindji language—had been deliberately buried between 916 and 963 years ago. The creature was a male that was probably between 4 and 7 years old at the time of death.

Its teeth showed signs of heavy use, and its skeleton bore healed injuries consistent with being kicked by a kangaroo. The animal had suffered broken ribs and a broken lower leg, and likely only survived because the Barkindji people cared for him.

“That it had lived through these injuries and been nursed back to health, it just tells you how much the community at the time cared for that animal,” Way tells the Guardian.

After he died, the dingo was buried in a riverside midden—a term archaeologists use to describe ancient garbage dumps—that appears to have been relatively new. The Barkindji people continued to add river mussel shells to the site for nearly 500 years afterward as part of a “feeding” ritual to honor the dingo.

“It’s a similar practice to what we see in many other cultures where descendants return to shrines and ancestral sites over the generations to bring gifts and offerings to the deceased," Way tells Live Science. “It tells us that this relationship is really strong and retained through time.”

The Barkindji community’s strong bonds with the garli continues to this day. Barkindji elders performed smoking ceremonies during the excavations and, after the research was finished, they brought the remains back to their land.

Dingoes “weren’t simply tolerated,” says lead author Loukas Koungoulos, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Western Australia, in a statement. They were “embedded in daily life.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.