Three more Tauros bulls

I have been covering Tauros cattle a lot here recently, and I have found some more photos of three Tauros bulls that are interesting. 
This includes a bull at Maashorst. The horns are really good. The size is ok, the curvature is basically right but should be more intense in order to be perfect. Actually the horns are better than in most Taurus cattle. The body shape and proportion cannot be judged because the bull is lying. 

Another bull is from Keent. I wonder what the breed combination of the bull is. I suspect that it is part Highland x Maremmana, the body shape reveals Highland influence and the long dewlap and the horns point to Maremmana. Since the bull is from Keent, Manolo Uno (Maremmana x Pajuna) might be the father. In this case the bull would be (Maremmana x Highland) x (Maremmana x Pajuna), what I consider plausible. 

The third bull is from Keent too. I have no idea what combination this one could be. 

Looking at the horns of the upper two bulls, I might reconsider my pessimism concerning the horns of Tauros cattle. The sizes of the horns are useful, and the curvature of the horns of the first bull is really good. 

K. L. Hartig's aurochs painting

There is an aurochs painting from 1955 that is worth noticing. It's the painting by the German artist K. L. Hartig, which can be seen here. It was done for a publication by the zoologist Hans von Lengerken in the same year. The original was coloured and is untraceable today, unfortunately. What is special about this painting is its accuracy. Hartig took measurements from a nearly complete skeleton and a skull from the collection of the natural history museum of Berlin, so the painting can arguably be called a reconstruction. The only aspects to criticize are that the shoulder hump is to low and the snout too short, perhaps also the head too small, but otherwise it is pretty accurate. The fact that the hump is too low was recognized in the literature as early as in 1957. While most historic aurochs reconstructions were rather imprecise or incorrect, with Hartig's painting there is at least one that gave an accurate impression of the aurochs' life appearance already back in the 1950s. 

The painting inspired me to do my own version of it. I based it on the Sassenberg bull skeleton, which I used quite often for my reconstructions. It is a large-horned Holocene specimen, but there were also Holocene aurochs bulls with comparably small horns such as the Himmelev specimen. 

Here is the result: 

Literature 

Walter Frisch: Der Auerochs - das europäische Rind. 2010. 

The Tauros cattle of Kettingdijk, Netherlands

On monday this week, Gerard vanne Smeed posted a blog article with many photos of the Tauros cattle from Kettingdijk in the Netherlands. Also with the link to the flickR page for more photos. It was awesome to the so many photos of a large Tauros cattle herd, as it is pretty hard to find good photos of the project on the web. 

The herd consists of crossbreeds and possibly also pure individuals of Limia and maybe also Maremmana as well as a pure Maronesa bull. The influence of Highland cattle still shows in a number of individuals that have the brindle coat colour pattern (see here or here for example). The Highland influence also shows in the colour and horns of this cow. Some individuals could easily be sold as Heck cattle, such as this bull or these cows. Interestingly, one bull is very pale-coloured, perhaps a combination of Maremmana and Highland colour alleles. There are also bulls with a correct colour such as this one. The adult bull on this photo also looks nice. Concerning the sexual dimorphism, there are lightly coloured cows but also many dark cows, bulls can be wholly black but about the half seems to have a colour saddle. So the sexual dichromatism is not very marked in the herd. Also, the bulls seem to be barely larger than the cows, which might be because they are not fully grown yet. All of the bulls seem to have a hump, which is good. The bulls are muscular overall, they just need longer legs. If I had to rank these Tauros cattle, I would say they are somewhere between Heck cattle and Taurus cattle. 

The Tauros Programme seems to have a different approach to the breeding. While most "breeding-back" projects breed by selecting a chief bull and selecting out individuals that do not fit the standards, the Tauros Programme seemingly let the cattle breed for themselves with many bulls in one herd, with barely any selection (the fact that there are still brindle individuals suggests to me that no selection has taken place yet, as this trait is dominant and easy to select out). Maybe the selection phase has not started yet. I think it is good that the cattle have bull competition in their breeding, as this enables natural selection, but I think this phase is too early for that. It will be very difficult to raise the quality* of the herds this way, except if all bulls were quality bulls. Again, maybe the selective breeding phase has not started yet and they will start selective breeding in the next months or years. 
 

*By quality I mean the resemblance to the aurochs in its morphological traits, not the surviving capacity, behaviour or other traits. 

Przewalski's horse cloned for genetic diversity

In 2015 I proposed cloning as a chance for the wisent's survival. Cloning pre-bottleneck wisents would greatly increase the genetic diversity of the species, since the modern population descends from a population of only about 50 individuals which itself descended from only 12 individuals. Adding the genetic diversity of wisents that lived before the dramatic bottleneck event in the 20th century would help the species to overcome its inbreeding depression. And if cloning is not possible, genome editing with CRISPR-Cas9 is a viable alternative. 

It seems that there are people who had the same idea for the Przewalski's horse, which descends from only 12 individuals as well. A stallion has been cloned from an individual that has been cryopreserved since 1980. For details, you can have a look at the article from Revive & Restore. 

I hope that cloning for conservation will not be restricted to this one individual. I hope this idea will be put into practice for other species as well, including the wisent. 

Reconstruction of aurochs cow horns

Recently I did a reconstruction of the horns of the Asti specimen at the Museo paleontologico territoriale dell'Astiagiano. 

Reconstructing the horn sheaths on the bony cores always requires speculation to a certain degree. The horn sheath continues the curvature of the bone, but there is no rule of thumb on how much the sheath increases length and thickness of the horn. Especially the length of the sheath may vary greatly in comparison to the bony core (see van Vuure 2005). So we can only guess how much the sheath added to the horns in the individual specimen. I usually reconstruct the horn sheath with 133% of the length of the bony core. 

Here is the result: 

Please do not use without permission. 

In modern cattle, Watussi, Heck cattle of the Wörth lineage and Maronesa may have horns similar to those above. A mix of all three might reach the goal both in curvature and dimensions. 

Another reconstruction of the Asti specimen is about to come. 

Tauros cattle arrived in Velebit, Croatia

As Rewilding Europe recently announced, 20 Tauros cattle (18 cows, two bulls) have been moved to Velebit, Croatia. They will join a herd of 120 individuals that consist of pure Sayaguesa and Maremmana as well as crosses of Sayaguesa, Maremmana and Tudanca that have been grazing there since 2016. The purebred bulls will be removed in turn if I understand correctly.
You can see photos of the herd here and here. 

Based on their looks, the herd might include Maremmana x Sayaguesa, Limia x Maremmana and Pajuna x Maremmana individuals. But that is only a guess. I doubt that these fully grown individuals are fifth-generation. First of all, the Tauros Programme counts the parental generation as first-generation, what means that their second-generation animals are actually the first cross generation. So that means they mean fourth-generation. Also that seems a far stretch for a breeding period of 11 years. Body shape and proportions are OK, they are pretty much the standard we see in Taurus cattle and primitive cattle breeds. So is the skull shape. The horns, however, are not that impressing, as in most Tauros cattle. They are to small and the curvature is not aurochs-like either. What I also noticed is that the cows are mostly pretty dark, what is true for most Tauros cattle. I wonder why. Surely, Sayaguesa contributes dark colour shades in cows but other projects achieve a nice reddish-brown coat colour even in half-Sayaguesas. Maremmana, Limia, Tudanca and Pajuna also have lightly coloured cows. So I wonder why most Tauros cows are that dark. 

The Tauros Programme, after 11 years of breeding, now has reached a level of good quantity. They have a total animal count in the three-figure range. What the programme needs is to improve the sexual dichromatism (i.e. achieve more lighter-coloured cows) and to improve the horns in both size and curvature. There are no size measurements for Tauros cattle (at least none that have been published) but the cattle at Keent (NL) do not look large. So they also might want to improve the size of the animals, considering that they are using a number of small breeds (Pajuna, Highland cattle, Maronesa). While selection can improve the sexual dichromatism and if they pay attention on only using bulls with good horns also the horn shape, I doubt that they can achieve the improvement of the horns and body size with the breeds they are currently using. The horn size of many Maremmana (the largest-horned breed they are using) is actually smaller than in the aurochs (see here, for example). Maremmana is also the largest breed they are using, and Maremmana does reach sizes of 170cm and allegedly more, but their Maremmana individuals don't look large (one of their Maremmana bulls was barely larger than the Pajuna bull, and the other one didn't look much taller than the Highland individuals). 
Summa summarum, I think the Tauros Programme needs breeds that add large size, truly large horn volume, and also a good horn curvature when starting the quality-building phase otherwise Tauros cattle might end up deficient in terms of horns and body size.