New Aurochs head reconstruction and new photo from Oostvaardersplassen

One week ago, I found a photo of a Brown Swiss x Holstein cross: 

©Norman Walker

Nothing of interest for breeding-back of course, but I found the skull shape rather interesting and thought of the Cambridge cow (or: putative cow), which's skull is not as elongated as in most other aurochs specimen though (there are not-as-long-snouted bulls as well, but such individuals are not very common in the record). So I superimposed the Camebridge skull on that cow's head, and found a perfect match - only the frontals of that cow are totally underdeveloped, because it has very tiny (or not even any?) horns. 

This inspired me to do an anatomically reliable reconstruction of the Camebridge cow's head: 

All rights reserved; please mention me if you want to use it. 

The cow isn't necessarily supposed to be black, in many aurochs-coloured cows the head and neck is black but the back is still reddish-brown. The surprise of that cow's head is that it looks quite similar to that of some domestic cows, so that breeding-back does not have to select for hyper-longsnouted cows exclusively. However a straight to convex snout profile should be obligatory. 

Moving to another snout-based issue, I recently found a photo from 2009 of a Heck herd at Oostvaardersplassen on the Wikimedia Commons: 

Taking a closer look, you will realize that some of the cows are rather long-snouted, much more than any Heck cattle outside the reserve and even more than many Taurus cows. This is impressing. It is not the product of artificial but pure natural selection. It is also surprising that this herd is composed of aurochs-coloured individuals exclusively, except that one calf with the white spot on its head - it could be a coincidence, but in the past Oostvaardersplassen had a high portion of grayish, steppe-cattle like individuals because of the bad quality of the founding herds. Now it seems that the number of aurochs-coloured cattle is increasing. How comes that, in the absence of predators, and what's the selective advantage of a long snout? 

I think that we see pleiotropic effects here. The farm fox experiment (more on that in a future post) has shown that selection for tameness in domestication also caused new, deviant features common in all domestic animals (white spots and paedomorphy for example). Now, with the cattle being exposed to natural selection for 30 years, I think natural selection favoured any genes that increase the fitness of the individuals, f.e. regulating behavioural aspects, such as dominant behaviour, feistiness etc. These genes might also result in traits seen in the wild-type (aurochs) which have been altered by the usual domestication process. So natural selection can redevelop wild traits even if that particular trait does not have an immediately visible selective advantage, probably even better than artificial selection. 

It is really a shame that the dedomestication taking place at Oostvaardersplassen is so horrendously understudied. We are witnessing evolution at work, guys! If a long-term dedomestication study would be started, this population probably will be a prime schoolbook example for an evolutional process.