"Breeding-back" aims to restore or immitate extinct animals by selective breeding. This blog provides general information, the facts behind myths and news from various projects.
Sunday 26 February 2023
Portrait of a generic aurochs cow
For today, I have a quick little sketch of an aurochs cow that I painted with GIMP. It is not a reconstruction of a particular specimen, but is a portrait of a generic aurochs cow that aims to show all the traits typical for female European aurochs. So far, no "breeding-back" cow of any project looks like that. However, I think it is quite possible to achieve something that resembles this quite closely. Possible breed combinations suitable for this endeavour would be Sayaguesa, Lidia, Chianina/Maltese, Watussi and Maronesa, considering only the best representatives of the respective breeds. One has to keep in mind that "breeding-back" with cattle is a long-term project as they are a slowly reproducing species. A possible breeding scheme could be breeding an F2 of the combination F2 (Sayaguesa x (F2 Lidia x Chianina/Maltese)) x F2 (Sayaguesa (F2 Watussi x Maronesa)). That would take five generations, hence 10-15 years. That is a long time of course, but current breeding projects have been running for a similar time span for now and the results of such a lineage could be quite qualitative. It must be kept in mind that the scheme I just described is only one of very many ways of getting to the goal that is producing a lineage of cattle that resembles the European aurochs to the largest possible degree.
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A nice quick piece of inspirational paleo-art there, Daniel. I would love to see what Watussi x Maronesa crosses might look like, especially some good F2s. By the way: Have you seen the photography project of Henrik Bobb? He has some beautiful shots, especially the full body portraits of Laokoons Bruder and what I am pretty sure is 79 842.
ReplyDeletehttps://photobox100.de/bovidae
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