Dr. Who nerds (and there are many of you out there) will have perked up at seeing the word, “Tardis.”

Serious Dr. Who geeks may also remember The Monsters from Earth,  the fourth short story to be published in the Doctor Who Annual 1966, and to our knowledge, the only instance when a purebred dog traveled in the Tardis.

In The Monsters from Earth,  Amy Barker, her brother, Tony, and their Bulldog, “Butch” are playing hide and seek when Amy and Butch dart into a telephone box to hide. Amy fantasizes that the box is a spaceship and begins to explore it, but when Tony eventually follows his sister into the phone box, his elbow hits the door causing it to swing shut, and the children are locked in the Tardis. The plot thickens from there.

Butch was by no means the only purebred dog in the series: Polly had a childhood Golden Retriever named Belle,  Mrs Cartwright’s dog was a Collie, and of course,  “Kelso,” was the German Shepherd Dog owned by Professor Frederick Marius, and the inspiration for Marius to build the robot dog, K9, when he had to leave Earth and couldn’t take Kelso along.

Our personal favorite Dr. Who will always be Tom Baker, and we learned that while filming of The Ribos Operation, Baker was unintentionally bitten on the lip by a Jack Russell Terrier owned by actor and director, Paul Seed, when he tried duplicate a trick Seed himself had done. For the remainder of filming, Baker wore heavy and uncomfortable makeup over the wound, and eventually, a scene was added to the beginning of the following episode to explain the wound and lessen the amount of makeup needed. In the publicity still seen here, sharp eyes will still be able to see a blemish on Tom Baker’s lip.

Dr. Who fans might be interested in this piece on someone’s re-imagining all twelve incarnations of the Dr. Who Time Lords as dogs.