It has been two months since my latest post. I didn’t publish any posts in those two months because I was busy doing new aurochs models. I started models of the Sassenberg bull, an Indian aurochs, and the Gramsbergen skull fragment. And last week I finished my model of the Sassenberg bull.
As usual, I started the model by working directly with photos of the original bones/skeletal mounts to achieve maximum accuracy. I know photos of the Sassenberg bull skeleton in lateral view, but the postcranial skeleton of this specimen is partly a composite, and thus not the most reliable options when we have more complete skeletons of a single individual. Therefore, I chose the Store-damme bull skeleton as the basis for the postcranial skeleton. I used a photo from the internet which shows the skeleton in a perfectly lateral view, and “corrected” the inaccurate posture of the mount using GIMP. I manipulated the position of the skeletal elements until an accurately assembled skeleton was the result. Using a different bull for the postcranial body is not a big issue, as there was little to no variation in the postcranial proportions of the aurochs, except for the fact that some had longer spinal processes in the shoulder region than others, but not to a huge extent. For the anatomy of the skull/head, I used a photo of the Sassenberg bull. The most idiosyncratic part of an aurochs were its horns, and I used photos from several different angles in order to correctly replicate the horn cores. Then, after sculpting the body, I sculpted the horn sheath on the horn core. This is necessarily only an approximation, as there was no general rule how much the horn sheaths added to the length and thickness of the horn. For the body morphology, I did not use more or less strongly domesticated cattle breeds as an analogue, but chose Spanish fighting cattle individuals as much as living wild bovines. I did so because the morphology of cattle was greatly affected by domestication, and Lidia cattle are probably the least-derived taurine cattle breed. But there is always some variation concerning the bulkiness of the individual, and it also depends on the individual age. A very old bull, be it Lidia or a wild bovine, is certainly more massive than a very young adult bull. I wanted to reconstruct the Sassenberg bull in its “prime time”, perhaps at the age of around 6 to 7 years in domestic cattle age years. I will do more massive “old” bulls in the future as well.
This is the result:
The model was sculpted from air-drying modelling clay of the DAS brand and was painted with acrylics. It is 33 cm tall at the withers, the scale to an actual aurochs bull depends on which height you choose for that, as the European aurochs varied from 160 to 200 and perhaps more cm at the withers in life. During sculpting my model, I constantly checked its accuracy by superimposing a photo of the model on the “corrected” photo of the actual skeletal mount, and I can happily say that the model lines up perfectly with the skeleton in lateral view. As for the head and horns, here is a photo of the model next to a photo of the Sassenberg mount in exactly the same position:
I am very happy with the result and I think it is quite likely that the model is more or less accurate. More reconstruction models are about to follow, the next one will probably be the Indian aurochs.
