sutton026

F inally I have the time and mood to write this post. Regarding the coat colour of Eurasian wild horses, historic reports give us a clue but are not always unambiguous. For example, there is room for interpretation what “tan” or “mouse-coloured” is supposed to mean, because the authors of former centuries certainly did not use the words in the sense of modern horse coat colour terminology. In previous posts, I summarized and analysed all historic texts on wild horse exterieurs available to me: What theTarpan looked like Westernwild horse exterieurs: what does the evidence actually say? C.H.Smith’s description of the Tarpan WereEuropean wild horses dun-coloured or not? Due to the ambiguity of historic accounts, genetic research identifying coat colour genes from ancient DNA of predomestic horses provides substantial additional clues on the actual colour of European wild horses. The last one of the posts linked covers a crucial question. Previously it has been resolved that Pleistocene a...

O riginally, the breeding sites at Kloster Lorsch and Bielefeld were part of the Uruz Project until a split last year . Now it is a project on its own run by the Freilichtlabor Lauresham and Förderkreis Große Pflanzenfresser Kreis Bergstraße (Kloster Lorsch) and Landschaftspflegebetrieb Hohmeyer (Bielefeld), and they still follow the plan of two-line breeding (Chianina x Watussi, Sayaguesa x Hungarian Grey/Maremmana). They are also thinking about experimenting with other combinations of these five breeds. A third herd is planned.  The project has its own name now, Auerrindprojekt . Auerrind in German means basically the same as aurochs ( Auer - ochse ), just with "cattle" (- rind ) instead of "ochs" as a suffix. Auerrind is not used as frequently as  Auerochse , but it exists.  The project also has a new website, in German: www.auerrind.wordpress.com . They are working on other language versions as well.  This website includes a news section where they will regula...

I did a post on the idea of how aurochs-coloured Chianina might look like a while ago. I did drawings by tracking out photos of a Chianina bull and a cow and coloured them in the wild type manner. But the drawings in the first post were rather sloppy. So I did new ones a few days ago: Original photo of the bull and the cow .  Colour is one of the most prominent traits of an animal that leap to the eyes when having the first glance at an animal. A completely striped donkey would look more like a zebra to us than a donkey, and vice versa. And an animal with aurochs-like colour but otherwise not many aurochs traits might look quite satisfying because that trait gets much attention. This is the case in for many Heck cattle that would otherwise look nothing like the aurochs.  And the reverse is the case as well. A "wrong" colour might make the animal appear less aurochs-like than it is, because it distorts the image as a whole. So I tried to imagine what wild type-coloured Chian...

W ith the full genome of a 6700 year old male aurochs being sequenced since 2013, it is possible to get better insight on the genetic relationships between wild aurochs populations and domestic cattle, if there was local introgression from wild individuals and which genome regions were particularly influenced by domestication. Now a summary of some recent papers.   The whole-genome sequencing data placed this British aurochs as an outgroup to all modern European cattle [1,2]. mtDNA suggested that Southern European and North-Central European aurochs formed different genetic groups, the latter one being closer to domestic cattle than North-Central European aurochs are [3]. Perhaps hence the genetic distance of the British aurochs, but I tend to think that a southern European aurochs would be an outgroup to cattle as well. Nevertheless, it seems confirmed that farmers did consciously breed wild aurochs into their stock. Orlando 2015 found that British cattle breeds (in particular: Hig...

T his is my 200 th post. I have been blogging for two and a half years now, it has been a lot of fun doing research, “field trips” and artworks for this blog. I thought it was time to do a little retrospect on what I have published here so far to give you an overview, also for readers that have not been following my blog for so long but might be interested in some older articles. I actually intended to read and correct form and language, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to do it thoroughly. Many of the pictures used in the posts became not displayed at some point due to either a change of html or errors by blogger. It’s annoying and I was not able nor had I the time to restore all of them. I apologize.   My first entries in May and June 2013 were rather modest. This post The various breeding-back efforts  provides a quick overview over the most important breeding-back attempts. However, it should be a bit more comprehensive and I might do a new one one day. This articl...