The Norwegian Puffin Dog

Actually it's a "Norwegian Lundehund" with some amazing abilities for a canine that most do not even have, including being "fox-sized" and having "six-toes"...

Five hundred or more years ago, the people on the northern coast of Norway had a different kind of prey to contend with: humble puffins. Puffins are small sea-birds. They look rather like small, flying penguins with big colorful beaks, and they like to nest in the narrow, twisting caves which honeycomb the local rocky sea-cliffs. The sheer inaccessibility of those cliffs helps to keep the predators away, while the caves add yet another layer of difficulty to anything trying to get at the puffins. Yet in northern Norway, puffins used to be a major source of winter food, and catching them in enough quantity to make it through the long winters was absolutely necessary. The "Norwegians " needed some help to catch this food source and this is why the "Puffin Dog" was bread.

The Lundehund's extraordinary flexibility is not limited to the forelegs. The dog's neck and spine are so flexible that it can lay its head back along its own spine, a position most humans couldn't get into under any circumstances short of a broken neck, let alone most dogs. What exactly is going on with the Lundehund's joints isn't certain, but it seems clear that something unique is happening to allow for such unusual joint mobility. The last of the Lundehund's cave-diving adaptions is a unique ear structure. Normally held upright and pricked, the Lundehund can seal its own ears shut by bending them either forward or backward. The species neared extinction but with the the help of just two people it has continued and the story of those two is as interesting as it is with the dogs... More at the Link...