My book is available on Amazon!

Today is a great day for me. My book Breeding-back wild beasts: aurochs, wild horse and quagga is published and available on Amazon!

 

Go here for my book on Amazon

 

With this book, I turned all the material I gathered on this blog in 12 years into one comprehensive work, but I also included new studies that I haven’t covered on this blog yet. The bulk of the work is on the aurochs, but of course it also has a chapter on wild horses with a lot of material, and also a chapter on the quagga. And of course also a chapter on dedomestication, which is also relevant for “breeding-back”.

The book has more than 150 images, most of which are photos and life restorations I haven’t published previously.

 

These are the contents:

 

- In the first section, I cover the debate of the influence of megafauna on the landscape

- The phylogeny, taxonomy, behaviour, ecology and morphology of the aurochs is covered, the latter very extensively as you can imagine

- The domestication of the aurochs is outlined, including remarks on the mechanisms of domestication in general, including the domestication syndrome

- The history of breeding back is outlined, the role of genetics in breeding back is discussed

- A section on the history and various breeding lines of Heck cattle with lots of photos

- A section on Taurus cattle in Germany and Hungary with lots of photos, including never-before published new photos of Hungarian Taurus cattle

- A section on Tauros cattle with lots of photos

- A section on Auerrind cattle with lots of photos 

- A chapter of sections discussing hybridization with wild bovines in breeding back, the challenges for breeding back, new breeding strategies based on genetics et cetera

- The taxonomy of wild horses with remarks on the status of the Przewalski’s horse

- An extensive section on the quest for the morphology and appearance of western Eurasian wild horses and its alleged subtypes

- A section on the origins of the Exmoor pony, the Konik and the Sorraia

- Thoughts for a “breeding-back” project with horses, covering the Lippeaue horses

- A chapter on the phylogeny, morphology and appearance of the quagga and of course also the Quagga Project

- A chapter explaining my dedomestication hypothesis focusing on cattle, covering the Heck cattle at Oostvaardersplassen and Chillingham cattle, the latter with lots of photos

- Final remarks

 

The book is of course in colour and printed on qualitative paper so you can enjoy the lots and lots of photos and artworks.

 

As you know, I put my heart blood in this book and I am confident that readers of my blog and all other enthusiasts for these extinct animals will enjoy it very much.  

 

Another archaic aurochs: the Wadi Sarrat skull

A while ago, I posted a reconstruction I did of an archaic aurochs from India. This time, I did a little sculpture of an aurochs that was even older, the Wadi Sarrat skull. It was published in 2015, found in Tunisia and is roughly 770.000 years old. The skull is only partially preserved, but with complete horn cores that have astonishing dimensions. The horns face forward in a 40° angle. No postcranial material has been recovered as far as I know.

 

I reconstructed the body based on the Store-damme skeleton and the head and horns precisely after photos of the Wadi Sarrat skull. For the colouration, I was inspired by a colour found in many wildtype-coloured zebu: black base colour with a dorsal stripe, light areas on the ventral body and brownish flanks. There is no evidence for the colour of aurochs that old, and since the Wadi Sarrat skull is outside the modern aurochs crown group, we have a bit of artistic license for the colour. Here is the sculpture:

 

If the bull the Wadi Sarrat skull belonged to was proportioned like that, it would have been 160cm tall at the withers.