sutton026

S ometimes commenters on my blog ask me on what I think about the idea of using extant, wild cattle species for breeding an accurate aurochs substitute. One could even go further and try to replace the aurochs with other, related bovine species instead of “breeding-back” results and/or dedomesticated cattle. For other exterminated species that did not leave domestic descendants this option is considered (such as using extant water buffalo for Bubalus murrensis ). However, domestic cattle are probably way closer to the aurochs in behaviour and ecology than extant wild bovines (see here). Nevertheless these could be used in order to obtain wild traits that domestic cattle lack altogether or to increase the fitness for survival in nature instead of waiting for those traits to re-develop via dedomestication. There is a good chance that the aurochs shared some wild traits or even the same alleles with its closely related species that domestic cattle have lost, and they could re-enter the g...

T oday, an international technical conference concerning the aurochs initiated by the Freilichtmuseum Lauresham launches in Lorsch, Germany. The title is The aurochs - breeding back and natural grazing for a wilder future?   The schedule for the conference can be viewed here .  What is really awesome about the conference is not only that it is the first conference centered around the aurochs per se, but also that people from all the three major current "breeding-back" projects are contributing (Taurus, Tauros and Auerrind) including Margret Bunzel-Drüke, Matthias Scharf and Olaf Zimball from the ABU, Ronald Goderie from the Tauros Programme, Claus Kropp from the Auerrind Project, Peter van Genejgen who breeds the beautiful Dutch Sayaguesa herds where the three projects got their Sayaguesa from and others.  Citing from the description, the conference " has the purpose of bring together the larger breeding-back on the extinct Aurochs (Taurus, TaurOs, Auerrind) to discuss t...

I n a number of posts, I mentioned that western wild horses, Equus ferus ferus, apparently were heterogeneous in coat colour: bay, bay dun, black and black dun are all confirmed by coat colour genetics (leopard spotted, another coat colour variant, was also confirmed but only at very low frequency so let us neglect it for now).  What is striking is that western wild horses seemingly belonged to the very few large mammals that display more than one colour variant in one population. The wildtype non-dun allele d1 originated in the early Late Pleistocene already, the black allele in the early Holocene according to Ludwig et al. and according to the new source that I am going to present in the Late Pleistocene on the Iberian peninsular and spread westwards.  I was wondering about the unusual heterogeneity in colour of wild horses. Ludwig et al. proposed this was a shift in colour due to increasing forestation of Europe during the Holocene, which I considered a plausible explanatio...