sutton026

T he “standard aurochs colour scheme” is as it follows: bulls being more or less completely black except a dorsal stripe and a muzzle ring of a light colour (whether there were also bulls with lightly coloured forelocks is unknown). For cows, various shades from completely reddish-brown, dark brown or black with a reddish-brown back/colour saddle and also “bull colour” are supported by evidence. There is not one good reason to assume that European aurochs bulls had a colour saddle, but at least some North African aurochs (I tend to think it was universal in this subspecies) had one, as outlined in my post on Bos primigenius africanus . For the Indian aurochs, nothing is known of its life appearance except for what goes beyond osteologic information, but we can speculate (emphasis on speculate) that it might have had a very similar colour to that of the European aurochs, but it could also had some differences as I outlined in the posts on Bos primigenius namadicus (the most recent and...

T his is a topic that has been barely covered here before, but is surely of interest for many of my readers especially since the 2015 article on the genetic studies involved in the Tauros Project was published by Rewilding Europe. The reason why I have covered neither the article nor the issue of genetic proximity here as such is that it is a lot to write and explain, and I haven’t had the time previously. However, this summer I have the time and inspiration to finally cover this topic appropriately. By genetic proximity, we of course refer to the genetic proximity of living domestic cattle to its wild progenitor, the Eurasian aurochs Bos primigenius primigenius . But there are several ways in which domestic cattle can be “close to their ancestor”, several ways how genetic proximity is defined or measured, and what it implicates for “breeding-back”. However, as I always admit, I myself am a layman in the field of genetics so please point me to mistakes if I made some. What was especial...

I n 2013 and 2015 respectively, I did posts on the Indian aurochs, Bos primigenius namadicus , the wild predecessor of zebuine cattle, each time supported by an artistic reconstruction I made for the subspecies. However, in this post I want to start from a new and go systematically over what we know about this divergent subspecies and what it might have been like. Bos primigenius namadicus is very enigmatic – based on current evidence, survived until 8.000 years ago at maximum, and there are no unambiguous artistic references and of course no literary references to the wildtype of the zebu. Before we dive medias in res, I want to define some expressions: when I use the term “taurine clade”, I do not refer to taurine cattle exclusively, but all animals that are on the branch of taurine cattle since the branches of taurine and zebuine cattle diverged, so also B. p. africanus and B. p. primigenius of course. The same goes with “zebuine clade”, it includes also B. p. namadicus . The na...