The Kopenhagen specimen is a more or less complete and well-preserved aurochs specimen exhibited at the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen. Its overall morphology suggests that it was a bull and it measures 180 cm tall at the withers. This means that in life it must have been between 185 and 190 cm tall. I recently did a life reconstruction based on a photo I was sent by Markus Bühler.
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| © Markus Bühler |
When doing reconstructions, I always take photos of the original bone material. In the case of skeletons, mounts at museums have to be taken with caution. Many of them are not mounted correctly. Often the knees are flexioned too much or too little, the position of the scapula is wrong or the spine is mounted in an unnatural manner. Therefore, before starting the reconstruction, I do a check if the skeleton is mounted correctly. In the case of the Kopenhagen skeleton, the mount is quite correct, the only thing I changed was the orientation of the humerus, I flexioned it a bit more than in the mount using GIMP on the original photo. Something that also has to be taken into account is the soft tissue between the bones in the living animal. There would be spinal discs between the vertebrae, elongating the spine compared to the mount, and there also would be cartilage between the leg elements. All in all, the live animal would appear bigger than the skeleton. Therefore I slightly elongated the spine on the photo. I also rotated the trunk slightly, so that its rear end is less lowered. Then I started the reconstruction. As usual I took living wild bovines as an anatomical analogue. This is the result:
It basically looks like a large Iberian fighting bull, just with a shorter trunk and longer legs. To me, this is yet another reason to regard Lidia cattle as the least-derived cattle breed on this world. At least I do not know of any other cattle breed that bears that much resemblance to the aurochs.
The Kopenhagen bull is one of the smaller-horned individuals, many have larger horns, but there are also some with smaller horns.
Good work, Daniel.
ReplyDeleteI remember that some people thought that this Danish specimen was an aurochs cow.
I think that it makes sense that it is in fact a bull (also because of its size).
This bull had a really short (muscled) trunk and long legs.
I agree that it looks like some Lidia bulls, but with longer legs and shorter trunk.
Maybe it would be interesting to see one day a post about body shape variation observed in some aurochs reconstructions (I remember that you once published something about horn shape variation observed in some aurochs specimens).
Thanks for sharing your investigation results.
A good reconstruction!
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be great if this museum and others which have skeletons of aurochs would allow multi-point laser scanning of each bone and the data could be accessed by anyone so that people could 3D print and so make their own replicas including discs cartilage etc so that they could test and gain more understanding from them, rather than them just remaining in cases?
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