Summer is coming!

Today I finished my last exam for this semester, what means that for me, summer has begun. This also means that the months of lethargy on this blog are over; I am going to fabricate a number of blogposts and artworks as soon as a I can. So for today, this is what you can expect to come during the next weeks:
  • A post on the genetic background of morphological traits and its implications for breeding
  • Some posts (or one big post) on the big question “Ancient Europe: one big forest or savannah?”
  • Portraits of two interesting bulls
  • Some more artworks and reconstructions on paper
  • The finishing of my new aurochs models (WIP photos about to come)  
  • I am going to start doing another aurochs horn model scale 1:1. Perhaps, but I am not sure yet if I will find the time and money, also a complete aurochs bull head 1:1 in trophy style.


Of course these ideas do cost me some time and effort, especially the upper two require a lot of literature and web research I was not capable of during the semester, but I promise that I am going to do my best during the next weeks. I have also been planning to some more general posts and also get in more species diversification, I just never got to it in the past. But I am going to try getting to it this time.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What can "breeding-back" achieve?

Image
T he previous three posts ( here , here , here , here  and here ) have explored the borders of “breeding-back”. I give a quick summary. The real differences between aurochs and cattle do not only concern size, coat colour and horns but actually the whole organism: its developmental biology, its endocrinology, its neurology, its behaviour, its morphology, its genome. And all those factors are interconnected and interact in a complicated way. It was probably selection on tameness alone that dramatically changed the organism and the typical traits of a domestic animal (“domestication syndrome”) was more of a by-product. Additionally to that, some new morphologic mutations and artificial selection on certain traits produced the typical domestic phenotype that we see in cattle. The involved number of loci are probably hundreds or more likely thousands. It is very likely that cattle are uniform for these key genes that are responsible for the typical domestic traits that are universal am...
Read more

New Auerrind herd arranged

Image
T he Auerrind project has gained a new area for breeding and natural grazing, the reserve Hammer Auen in Groß-Rohrheim, Germany. Two heifers, namely Ambra the Watussi x Maremmana and the Sayaguesa x Grey cattle, have been moved to the area recently and another two individuals are about to follow. Here are some recent photos:  Grey x Sayaguesa right and Watussi x Maremmana left (©Copyright www.auerrind.wordpress.com) Watussi x Maremmana heifer in close-up (© www.auerrind.wordpress.com) The Watussi crossbreeds are among the most interesting to me of the Auerrind project so far. I like the somehow tropical appearance of the fur of Ambra (short, shiny and contrast-rich colour). She seems to have a Watussi-like ribcage but the zebuine hump is only very weakly developed to almost invisible and the horns are probably going to be mighty. The colour is perfect (the distribution of the black pigment is slightly zebuine*, but that is nit-picking; it is very interesting to see that this allele...
Read more

New photo of some Tauros bulls

Image
G eer vanne Smeed published a new photo of four Tauros bulls at Kempen~Broek on columbusmagazine.nl .  Tauros bulls in Kempen~Broek © Geer vanne Smeed Anyone can guess what kind of breeds or crossbreeds these bulls are and it is probably impossible to find out with the information given in the web, but I speculate that the lying bull at the right might be a pure Maronesa, the bull left to it a Maronesa crossbreed, the bull right in the back a Maremmana crossbreed and no idea on the last one.  EDIT: Geer vanne Smeed told me that according to his opinion the crossbred bulls might be Limia x Maremmana, Maremmana x Maronesa and Maronesa x Limia as those were the breeds present in the herd during the last years  As to the looks of the bulls, the colour is flawless in all individuals. The body shape of the bulls in the foreground cannot be determined as they are lying on the ground, but all of them seem to have a hump and are not that bulky. They might not be quite as large and...
Read more