In Aztec mythology, at the end of the sun’s journey across the sky, when it descends below the horizon into the depths of the perilous unknown, Xolotl is solely responsible for guarding the sun and ensuring it returns safely for a new day. This canine deity has the power to escort the sun — and our souls — through the night, from death to rebirth, from dusk to dawn. The Aztecs believed that our time is the fifth era of a creation and destruction cycle; all life on our planet has been obliterated four times — four suns — before our present age. At the end of the Fourth Sun, the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, and his dog-headed twin, Xolotl, ventured into the graveyard of the underworld to retrieve the bones of life, and it is from these bones that humanity was restored and an earthly dog companion, the Xolo, was created. One of the oldest dog breeds in the world and potentially the first known in the Americas, the Xolo crossed the Bering Strait into the new world about 11,000 years ago. The oldest statues of Xolos date back to 3,700 years ago, with ceramic effigies found in a staggering number of burials throughout Mexico, possibly as a symbolic representation of their guardianship through the afterlife. Generally, we see these depictions of Xolos in ancient Mesoamerican art, with their well-defined, spade-shaped, erect ears and wrinkles in the skin to indicate a lack of fur.