sutton026

S ometimes timing is funny. In November 2017 I wrote a post defending the Przewalski's horse's status as a wild animal. A new study by Orlando et al. has challenged the status of the Przewalski's horse as the last living genuine wild horse. The earliest archaeological evidence of horse husbandry is from the Botai culture of Kazakstan from 5.500 years ago. It has been assumed previously that these Botai horses belong to the earliest strain of domestic horses of the caballine lineage. Surprisingly, the authors found only about 2,7% Botai-related ancestry for all domestic horses from 4.000 years ago, while the authors claim the Botai horses turned out to be the ancestral stock of the modern Przewalski's horses population. I have not read the paper yet because it is behind a paywall, thus I cannot see what led the authors to the conclusion that all modern Przewalski's horses descend from the Botai population and not just that the Botai population was part of the przewa...

I n Biological basics III: The species concept – a complicated issue , I gave a little overview over how a species is usually defined and what a species actually is. Today’s post is going to look at subspecies. The understanding of the concept of a subspecies is necessary for some aspects of “breeding-back”, such as the issue of using zebus in aurochs projects and, more essentially, the Quagga project. Subspecies are sometimes called a cop-out, nit-picking or something for bored taxonomists, and I am going to outline why this critique is not fact-based. Subspecies – something for bored taxonomists? The short and definite answer to this is No. As Charles Darwin already noticed absolutely correctly and perfectly subsumed, subspecies are incipient species and the line between varieties, subspecies and species is gradual. As he noted in his opus magnum, On the origin of species , species are basically “strongly marked varieties”, and subspecies are a state in between. And as the previous ...

H aving had a look at how species are usually defined, this post is on the result of the reproduction between two distinct species – hybrids. More precisely, with this post I want to illustrate the role of hybridization in evolution and to show that hybrids are neither Frankenstein creations of bored farmers or zoos, or signs of the apocalypse (as hybrids of polar bears and brown bears are sometimes presented in the media). I also want to go into the role of hybrids in conservation with reference to one particular case, the wisent Bison bonasus . The role of hybridization in speciation Speciation is the event of the evolution of a new species. Most species evolve either through anagensis or cladogenesis. Anagenesis refers to the case of one species directly evolving into another. Cladogenesis is the evolution of new species by the split into new evolutionary lines, called clades, caused by reproductive isolation. In both cases, the genotype gets transformed by mutation, selection and ...

B efore I continue with my Biological basics series I want to announce an idea that I have been thinking about for some weeks now. A couple of people told me that I gathered so much material on the Breeding-back blog in the form of literature references, information on projects, trips, reports, photos, artworks and own theories that it would be worth to publish all that as a book. I like that idea pretty much and I am confident that I can accumulate enough material to fill a comprehensive book with it, so I have been working on a preliminary table of contents for now. What is important is that this book would not be a mere copy+paste collection of articles of the BBB, not at all. It will be a well-structured work that collects all the material of the blog topic by topic, goes more in-depth and will be precisely researched and referenced. Of course it will give a precise overview over the history and present of the major breeding-back projects, breeds involved and results. And it will a...

T odays post is on a rather theoretical topic, namely the definition of a species. It is very basic, but a necessary requirement for other issues such as hybridization or the subspecies concept, which are relevant for several units of “breeding-back”. At first it might seem easy to define a species, but everybody who has a basic deeper knowledge of biology will know that it is actually a very tricky issue. There are several concepts and definitions of a species, and none of them qualifies as the ideal and only one. This is why there is the saying “ in a room of n biologists there are n+1 species definitions ”. The reason for this problem is that the taxonomical system that classifies organism is an artificial one made by us humans in order to work efficiently with the diversity of living beings. Classical Linnean ranks, thought to us in school and common to most people having a basic biological knowledge, are painfully artificial and subjective which is why they are usually avoided in ...