What is a raccoon dog and why is it being linked to COVID-19’s origin?

Raccoon dogs are small, fluffy, rotund creatures — and now some are postulating that they may be involved in the COVID-19 pandemic spread.

Last week, a team of international researchers shared with the world a discovery possibly linking the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to a breed of animal in a Wuhan, China wet market: specifically, a raccoon dog.

French virologist Florence Débarre of the French National Centre for Scientific Research spotted the information by chance while scouring a worldwide database, and shared it with a group of scientists based outside of China looking into the origins of the coronavirus.

The genetic sequences were uploaded to the world’s biggest public virus database in late January, but have since been removed.

According to the World Health Organization, genetic sequencing data showed that some of the samples taken at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which were known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists.

“There’s a good chance that the animals that deposited that DNA also deposited the virus,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in analyzing the data. “If you were to go and do environmental sampling in the aftermath of a zoonotic spillover event, this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.”

And while the connection signals good things in terms of getting closer to COVID-19’s origins, a lot of people were taken aback by the name of the animal. So what, exactly, is a raccoon dog?

Physically, raccoon dogs look pretty much how their name implies — they resemble a small-to-medium size dog with a raccoon head. They’re small, fluffy and many have stout, rotund bodies.