sutton026

A BC News made a short reportage on "De-extinction" of extinct species, focusing mainly on the quagga from 0:58 onwards. I think that most of my long-term readers will be familiar with the information provided, but there are nice shots of the Rau zebras. Should I ever be to South Africa, my goal would be certainly to visit one of the QP herds.  By the way, I really agree with what Dr. Robert Fleischer ( geneticist, one of the autors of "A rapid loss of stripes: the evolutionary history of the extinct quagga ) says in the video about the extinct-ness of the quagga, for reasons I outlined in previous posts ( see here ). However, I am not agreeing with the "we can do it but should we do it?" quote.

M y two little models of  aurochs bull and cow (for a precise description see here ) are now on permanent display at the Alpenzoo Innsbruck, for anyone who would like to see them in real: The Alpenzoo Innsbruck is a zoo in Innsbruck, Austria. It has virtually all vertebrate species living in the alpes, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in Central European wildlife. It also has a little herd of wisent, I think it is currently the only Austrian zoo having this species on display.

W hen comparing the anatomy of bison, yak and aurochs in flesh, there is one distorting factor: the fur. While the fur of the aurochs and cattle is roughly (very roughly) the same length all over its body, with exceptions on the tail and the forehead, yak have long hairs at the ventral side of their body, almost reaching the ground. Bison have a huge shock of hair on their head and neck and shoulders are covered in shaggy dense fur as well, while from the end of the shoulders onwards the body is virtually naked. The contrast is not that sharp in the wisent but still evident. These different types of coat make it difficult to compare the body shape and proportions between these four species because the life appearance of the animals is greatly altered. It would be a funny idea to take a bison, wisent and wild yak (of the same sex of course) and trim their coat, in order to see what their body is actually shaped like. But that won’t happen. So I took pieces of papers ...

W ild animal populations are not always completely homogeneous regarding their colouration. This is not surprising of course, otherwise their colour would never undergo an evolutionary process. Point mutations happen, and in some cases they either provide a fitness advantage or become fixed by genetic drift or both. The chance for that should be higher when there are considerable biotic/abiotic changes or very active population dynamics incl. bottleneck events occur, or - again - both. Colour mutations can also have negative effects, either because they are linked to deficiencies or diseases, or provide a fitnes disadvantage. Such disadvantageous colour mutations consequently disappear quickly, may be only a singular event. But sometimes new colour morphs are neutral and keep showing up in the population for a considerable time. Famous examples are melanistic leopards and jaguars (leucistic tigers seemingly have disadvantages in the wild). As a side note, of course such mutations are t...

A fter finally having done a post on Bubalus murrensis , it’s time to look at the extinct European wild ass, Equus hydruntinus . This enigmatic taxon once roamed Europe during the Pleistocene until the a part of the Holocene, and its presence is therefore interesting for “European rewilding”. This post is going to investigate its systematic position, time and range, looks and reasons for extinction. And of course which implications it has for the (re)introduction of megafauna here in Europe. But before that, there is some (paleo-)equine terminology to learn: caballines: anything closer to horses than to other living equines (or: domestic horses opposed to the Przewalski’s horse) hemiones: E. hemionus plus E. kiang , which form a clade stenonines:   Equus stenonis plus similar equine remains from the Plio-Pleistocene. asinines: anything closer to the African wild ass E. asinus than to other living equines. Skull of E. hydruntinus from Crimea, taken from...

D uring the Pleistocene and probably also until the antiquary, Europe was not inhabited by only two species of bovine – aurochs and wisent – but three. This third bovine was Bubalus murrensis , an indigenous species of water buffalo. It is extinct and left no living descendants. Nowadays, due to the European rewilding movement, the genus Bubalus has gained some interest for landscape conservationists and “rewilders”. It is important to distinguish between living European variants of the domestic water buffalo, descending from the Asiatic Bubalus arnee , and the indigenous species B. murrensis . Are water buffalos a perspective for conservation in Europe, and are they further a legitimate megafauna species on this continent? Bubalus murrensis – the true European water buffalo B. murrensis was part of a clade within Bubalus that is now extinct and that was different from B. arnee . Since the postcranial skeleton of large bovines are all very similar, most mate...

M y blog has recieved almost 600 comments by now, which is awesome. I appreciate each of them and am thankful for the vivid interest in my posts! But one thing is that a lot of commenters here write anonymous comments. That's not a problem per se, but confuses me because I don't know with how many people I am dealing with and who I wrote something already or not, with the result that I wrote the same stuff multiple times. That's a bit impractical. Therefore I would like to ask my commenters to pick a consistant name for their comments, just for me to know who I am dealing with to maintain a useful mode of communication. When posting, there is a function "Comment as" where you have a lot of options - one of them is "name/URL" where you can type just any jibberish as "name" if you prefer not to reveal your true identity. Or you could simply write your name or "name" below or above your actual text in the comment. I prefer pseudonymous o...