sutton026

T he 23 preserved quagga skins tell us that there was quite considerable variation regarding stripe reduction in this animal. This is not only an interesting fact for itself but also of importance for the Quagga Project. So I tried to capture this colour diversity in one picture, so that we can see it at one glance. I decided only to use the skins as a reference. There are plenty of old drawings depicting quaggas, but most of them are from a time after its extinction. And those that might be contemporaneous are, just as many the others, mostly just copies of the widely used photo of the mare at London zoo (by the way,  I decided not to include the London mare, which is identical with the Edinburgh skin, because I already did an illustration of that specimen and it does not differ substantially from the other quagga individuals). The webpage of the QP project provides a nice overview over all preserved skins with background information. A quick google research will result in mor...

S ince most of my aurochs illustrations are rather technical, I felt like doing some lifelier drawings. I intended to show natural behaviour of wild and domestic cattle that surely was true for the aurochs as well, and also some episodes reported from Jaktorow.  The bull on the lower drawing is a life restoration of the huge Pleistocene skull fragment + horns ( here ). Aurochs humping domestic cows is a behaviour reported by Schneeberger in Gesner 1602, and also suggested by genetics. Schneeberger also wrote of a cow that he witnessed which was very mangled and he believed it would not survive the next winter. The cow at the lower right of the lower drawing is meant to be an illustration of that individual - I think it is the first time that someone illustrated a particular, once-living aurochs individual that really existed and was physically described in the literature. My drawing of the carcass of the last living aurochs is basically just any dead aurochs cow, on the other hand....

D uring the last weeks, my motivation for writing was not that high. But instead, my spent some time doing my artistic activities. Dinosaur models and drawings, which are not quite of interest for that blog, but also some others. Today I want to share a little illustration of a quagga herd in their native environment somewhere in South Africa.  I rarely do life scenaries because I prefer to do my rather technical drawings, therefore the results are not very elaborated. So mostly I leave it to those who are better at it. But this time I tried it again, also because I feel that the quagga is rarely illustrated as a herd animal in its natural enviroment. The coat pattern of these individuals is based on the 23 preserved skins. A more precise illustration of the coat pattern variation in the quagga population is going to come soon.

D ue to the lack of time, my latest extensive post has been long ago, I apologize. This time, I want to present a drawing I recently did plus a little bit of background information. It is an illustration of the last aurochs after its death in 1627.  As frequent readers of my blog will know, the Polish forest of Jaktorów was (most likely*) the last refuge for the aurochs on earth. They were guarded, forstered and also hunted. In the year 1557 the herd numbered probably about 50 animals. But habitat loss, lack of nourishment, poaching and cattle diseases made effective conservation increasingly difficult, as did the severely cold winters**. So their number shrunk to 38 in 1567, then 24 in 1599 and subsequently four in 1602. By 1620, the last male aurochs had died (One of this bull's horns was ornamented and preserved and is now housed at Stockholm, here ). Now the species was eventually doomed to extinction. * There is the possibility that a game park at Zamoyski kept aurochs around ...