10 years Breeding-back Blog + the Gramsbergen aurochs

Since May this year, I have been running the Breeding-back blog for ten years now. So far, it had more than 1,2 million page views, 500 posts and more than 2000 comments. I am very happy with that and want to celebrate it by presenting my recently finished aurochs clay model, based on the Gramsbergen aurochs. 

 

What I call the Gramsbergen aurochs is a specimen that is known only from a skull fragment with horn cores that is on display at the Museum of Gramsbergen. I know two photos of this skull fragment, that are unfortunately not online anymore. One shows it in frontal view, one in dorsal view. What is interesting is that the lateral horn orientation of that specimen is comparably vertical, around 45° in frontal view. It is very hard to tell if the skull fragment is from a bull or a cow, but since the orbital bosses are not much protruding, the postorbital region does not look very massive and the horn shape does not resemble most of the definite bull skulls, I assume it is more likely that this fragment belonged to a cow. 

For my model, I used the Sassenberg skeleton as a reference for the cranial and postcranial morphology since it is the only complete definite cow skeleton from Europe that I am aware of. As always, the model was done taking measurements from the photos that I have access to, to ensure maximum accuracy. 

For the colour, I chose a rather standard scheme out of the many possible shades that an aurochs cow might have displayed. Some depictions in Lascaux show exactly that colour. 

The head itself resembles that of Sayaguesa and Lidia cows or a mix of both. I would imagine that a combination of Sayaguesa, Lidia, Watussi and Maronesa could result in an animal that resembles this particular individual quite closely at least concerning head, horns and colour. Morphology is more difficult to achieve.