My time is
sparse these days, so only a short post for today. I didn’t notice it before,
but Vienna does have some little treasures for hopeless aurochs nerds like me.
The NHMW
(Naturhistorisches Museum Wien) has, among some scanty postcranial material,
the a skull consisting only of the skull base, horns and frontals.
As you can
see, the horns are rather long, wide-ranging and not curved that strongly as in
other (male) aurochs specimen, therefore I assume it was a female. These horns
are also more upright than those of many Iberia-based cows, they resemble those
of some Hecks with good horns. I think this underlines that there was considerable
variation regarding horn size, thickness, horn span, intensity of the curvature
and, to a lesser degree, also orientation relative to the skull – although the
basic curvature, the “primigenius spiral”, was always the same. This
variability of the horns seems to be higher than in other large bovines to me,
and I wonder why this is the case. One obvious explanation is regional
variation over the wide range of the species, but most aurochs skulls are from
Europe, therefore this explanation is not very conclusive. It is accepted in
the literature that average the horn size of the aurochs tended to decrease
during the Holocene, and perhaps this also goes for the horn width; or simply
the aurochs’ horns were always that variable.
During an
exhibition on recently extinct animals in the same museum I came across a nearly complete skull of
an aurochs that probably was a male. I didn’t have my measuring tape with me so
I compared it with my arm and it might be between 60-70 cm long. That skull was
definitely larger than my Taurus bull skulls, which measure 44 and 49 cm in
length, and it was pretty apparent to me that the snout was considerably longer
and the orbital openings smaller – the typical difference between an aurochs
skull and the paedomorphic skull of domestic cattle, although the Taurus skulls
are more primitive than that of more-derived breeds and many un-crossed Heck
cattle. If you have a look at the horns, you will see that they are curved more
strongly than those of the putative cow above and point more forwards.
The quality
of the photos is not overwhelming because it was pretty dark and I took it with
my phone.
Yet even
more pleasant for me was the discovery that there are genuine aurochs horn
sheaths in Vienna too. Two to be exact, in the KHMW (Kunsthistorisches Museum
Wien). I did not take photos, but here is one from Wikimedia commons:
The sheaths
are only slightly discoloured, giving them an orange tint. What surprised me
was their small size. The distance between the outer base and the tips in both
horns (I do not know whether they were from the same individual, but I do not
think so) was surely not much larger than 40 cm – again I forgot to take my
tape with me, so I had to use my arm again. The bony horn cores of course must
have been even smaller (we could get an impression of how the horn core looked
like if a silicone cast of the inside of the sheath would be made). The size of
the horns was still large enough to not look disproportionally small by aurochs
standards on a 150-160 cm animal, actually I got the impression they were about
as large as the sheaths of one of my Taurus bull skulls, and the animal it is
from looked like that life. But they were certainly smaller than the average of
the horn cores that we know, which
are usually several centuries to millennia older than sheaths from the medieval
times. I would be curious on how large the other horn sheaths from the time
were to see how drastic the horn size reduction towards the end of the aurochs’
existence was. This decrease in dimensions likely was linked to the absence of
large feline hunters, trophy hunting (see elks), and habitat destruction caused
by agriculture.
Dear Daniel,
ReplyDeleteDo you know whether there has been any recent development regarding dispensations from ear marking og cattle in the EU? I made a review some ten years ago, and at the time only two projects (the OVP and Veluwezoom, both in th Netherlands) had dispensations.
My compliments for your wonderful cattle photos on Flickr.
Karsten
Thank you! I'm sorry, I have no idea on that ear marking issue.
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