After I finished my reconstruction of the Sassenberg bull, I now can present another model, this time of the Indian aurochs.
In the lack of a complete skeleton or an assessment of the known material, this necessarily involved more speculations than the reconstruction of the well-known European subspecies. It is based on several incomplete crania of presumably male specimen, mainly on two skulls which can be seen here. They are not complete, but some morphological differences to the European form can be derived from it. More speculative was the postcranial body, where I simply took the skeleton of the Store-damme aurochs as the base. Not out of carelessness, but because I assume there were no noticeable differences in proportions and overall body shape between the European and the other aurochs subspecies because all of those traits were functional (the short trunk, the long legs, the presence of high spinal processes in the shoulder area forming a hump etc.). The horns are based entirely on the skull displayed in the Geological survey of India, because there are photos in frontal view and from the side of it, giving a good idea of how the horn cores look like in real. The colour is almost entirely speculative. What is likely is that the Indian aurochs had the E+ allele on the Extension locus, and that there was sexual dichromatism to at least some degree. This is the result:
For the colour, I used Deshi zebu bulls as a template. Those light areas between the legs are speculative, but not entirely baseless as it could also have been present in the African aurochs and even banteng have lightly coloured “armpits”. Should there ever be evidence against those light areas, I can easily paint over them on my model, but I doubt there ever will be. The horns look very large after adding the horn sheath to the cores, but the Indian aurochs had proportionally larger horns than the European subspecies. And some specimen quite possibly also larger horns in absolute dimensions. I gave my Indian aurochs a larger dewlap than what is likely for the European subspecies, because of thermoregulation and display function. Also the ear shape is that of zebus, because I consider it likely or at least possible that the ear shape of zebus was inherited from the Indian aurochs. This gives the model a more indicine appeal, additionally to the skull shape. All in all, I think it is a quite plausible representation for what the ancestor of zebus possibly might have looked like.
