If you’ve ever caught a raccoon digging through your neighbor’s garbage can at night, you may have been witnessing evolution in action .
A new study in the online journal Frontiers in Zoology suggests that city raccoons are slowly becoming domesticated. Not quite cuddly house pets, but definitely less razor-fingered creatures of the night.
Scientists from University of Arkansas at Little Rock analyzed nearly 20,000 images of raccoons from across the United States. They found that raccoons living in cities have shorter snouts than their countryside cousins in rural areas.
Shorter snouts are a classic indicator of domestication syndrome, a set of physical traits that tend to emerge when animals start becoming more tolerant of humans.
IFL Science notes that small physical changes,

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