Far fewer people probably know about the development of fox farming on Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. This history is buried in plain sight, you might say, since you can learn about it easily if you visit International Fox Museum and Hall of Fame on the island.

The museum is not a common destination for evolutionary biologists who specialize in domestication. But one of them did visit back in 2015, and he was taken aback.

The late Raymond Coppinger, a biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who was a major contributor to the study of dog evolution, toured the museum and returned full of questions.

“He saw these pictures of spotted foxes, and they looked just like the Belyaev foxes,” recalled Kathryn Lord, an animal behaviorist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the first author of the new paper. Dr. Coppinger was her mentor at Hampshire College.

There have been academic reports as well, suggesting that the Russian foxes hailed from Prince Edward Island, Dr. Lord said: “Different pieces of the story were all over, but nobody had put it together.”

As it turned out, genetic tests showed that Dr. Belyaev’s foxes did have roots in eastern Canada, which almost certainly meant Prince Edward Island. So the question bothering Dr. Coppinger and Dr. Lord was this: How much domestication had gone on before the famous fox experiment began?