sutton026

A little bit delayed news. It was born on 10th of december 2013. See here . It has a clear brownish tint, but I am not sure if one could say that it is significantly more prominent than in non-selected plains zebras. What is interesting is that the stripes seem to fuse to a dark brown colour on the upper arms in this individual; I have noticed that in several other Rau zebras as well.  I think I'm going to draw another prediction of how Rau zebras might look like by 2025, additionally to my first one .

T here really are not many qualitative, anatomically correct aurochs reconstructions. Most artists make typical mistakes or just do not research properly. For example, there are artworks for which their creators certainly didn't care much on what the horns actually looked like, or which proportions the animal had. There are numerous very good illustration of other extinct bovines, such as extinct bison, Pelorovis , Leptobos and so on. But not even artists like Mauricio Anton, one of the greatest artists for extinct mammals of our time, seem to get the aurochs right. I think the reason for that might be that there are living models for the other taxa (living bison and buffaloes), while domestic cattle are used for the aurochs. Using cattle as models is sensible of course, I do it all the time, but it is a bad mistake to use their body shape for the aurochs. That is a typical pitfall for many artists. Except it is a breed that either lives in the wild or has a body conformati...

I t is interesting how easy we might fail when estimating the size of an animal without appropriate metric reference objects. I experienced it myself when I stroke the Heck bull at the Tierpark Haag and thought that one might be around 150cm tall at the shoulders. I measured him and he turned out to be mere 140cm, the typical size for Heck bulls. It gets even more difficult when we encounter the animal moving in the field, and often they get overestimated. That’s why sometimes crocodiles or komodo dragons are believed to have astounding lengths like eight or six metres, but once shot and measured they turn out to be within the normal size range of their species. But I was surprised that even guessing the size of an animal next to a person on a photo can be rather difficult. I realized that when had a look at this photo of a Heck bull standing next to a man ( http://www.morgenweb.de/polopoly_fs/1.2091254.1423066752!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/galerie_940q/image.jpg ). The bull look...

C loning probably is the only possible way to revive an extinct species or subspecies. But people inevitably associate it with Jurassic Park, Dolly, and clueless priests that delight us with their dispensable comments. Also, people always raise the following questions: Can we do it? (I am not a geneticist, but see below). Should we do it, what good is in it? I hate this question. It is exactly that kind of ugly pragmatism that is the death of science. Why studying anything that doesn’t bring mankind any immediate advantages? We research for knowledge’s sake. Apart from that, it can have a practical good since most species exterminated by man were part of modern ecosystems. People often argue that cloning a single individual would be pointless because you cannot recover a whole species from it and the animal would suffer from its aloneness. First of all, what if we find the absolutely last moa in the NZ forests? Would we preserve and study it, or would be roast and eat it? A c...

I t was not new to me that the same spotted patterns we see in domestic cattle sometimes also occur in cervids. But until I did a quick google seach I didn't know how widespread it actually is. Spotted patterns can be found in red deer, roe deer, white-tailed deer and elk. At first I thought that these colour variants are the result of incipient domestication. There are deer populations that have been kept in game parks for many generations and it is likely that they have also been selected for tameness to a certain degree, simply for practical reasons. I think it is unlikely that these populations have been totally reproductively isolated, but they were probably isolated enough to develop the typical "novel traits" of domestication: new colour variants (f.e. totally white red deer, or fallow deer with very dark shades), piebald patterns, or shortened skulls (fallow deer). However, the presence of these piebald patterns in elk and white-tailed deer, which have certainly n...