Wednesday 28 December 2022

Reconstruction of a complete Indian aurochs skull

The Indian aurochs, Bos primigenius namadicus, is enigmatic compared to the European subspecies. Not a single complete skeleton has been found yet, and I have not seen a complete cranium either. I wanted to get an idea how the complete skull of that subspecies might have looked like, so I tracked out the namadicus skull presented in [1] (which might or might not be the same skull that is on display at the Geological Survey of India) on paper and reconstructed the complete skull using the fragmentary cranium. 

 

The trickiest part was to estimate how long the snout would have been. I suspect that the skull broke off right before where the nasal bone and the premaxillary bone touch each other, and that the toothless part of the upper jaw is roughly the same length in lateral view as the toothed part. The lower jaw is based on those of European skulls. This is the result:

I think the result is very plausible, it does not look proportionally weird concerning the snout length. It also looks credible for a type of aurochs that was the predecessor of indicine cattle. For comparison, here is a zebu skull. 

 

As no postcranial material that is worth mentioning has been published so far, I cannot do this with a complete skeleton, unfortunately. However, I think there must be enough fragmentary postcranial material of that subspecies to make a composite skeleton, so that it is possible to get an idea what the morphology of namadicus was like. A rigorous description of the postcranial skeleton of the Indian aurochs is lacking so far. 

 

[1] Gregoire Metairs: Evolutionary history of the large herbivores of South and Southeast Asia (Indomayalan Realm).2016. 

 

2 comments:

  1. I've been meaning to do this forever with my collection of namadicus and suxianensis photos. I really should revive my blog.

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  2. The warm humid climate of India and south east asia make old biological and skeletal remains to decompose.

    Biological materials can be preserved for a very long time if frozen (like in the tundra), in wet bogs or in mud (without oxygen) or in very dry climates.
    Not in tropical climates.

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