I actually
wanted to include this in my upcoming book – which will be published soon – but
it turned out to be too speculative for my taste. It is about this skull from
the Middle Pleistocene of India:
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As you can
see, the horns are very wide-ranging, but unfortunately not preserved
completely. In order to get a more complete picture of what the horns might
have looked like in life, I sculpted a little head bust in trophy-style to
reconstruct the horns three-dimensionally.
I only know
a couple of photos of this skull, of which none are in a clear profile shot,
but I was able to replicate the horn cores rather exactly based on the photos.
Then I sculpted the horn sheaths over them. This is the result:
While the
actual morphology of the head and horns is based on osteological evidence, the
colour is entirely speculative. As these Middle Pleistocene aurochs are very
likely outside the taurine + indicine clade, I played a bit with my fantasy
regarding the colour. It could well be possible that it had the “standard”
aurochs colour, especially considering the fact that Java banteng have an
almost identical colour to the “standard” colour.
All in all,
based on what I have seen from Bos acutifrons so far, I think the idea
that there was a morphological continuum from acutifrons to namadicus
to primigenius is not far-fetched. Interestingly, the earliest record of
aurochs is currently from Tunisia. In the Early Pleistocene in Africa, there
was another species of catte that had, just like acutifrons, large and very
wide-ranging horns as well, Bos buiaensis. I think it is not
entirely impossible that acutifrons and buiaensis were conspecific and
ranged across two continents (just like primigenius) and gave rise to the
aurochs. But without any genetic information, which would also be needed from Leptobos,
Epileptobos and Pelorovis, it is impossible to resolve the exact
origins of the aurochs – at least currently.
So, was namadicus
a distinct species, Bos namadicus, or a subspecies of Bos primigenius?
This question is, in the lack of a clear species definition, impossible to
answer and thus is up to the author’s preference. Another problem is that since
species evolve gradually, that “transitional forms” and “real species” are just
arbitrary categories based on the time we live in, which we choose as an
arbitrary anchor. If species A evolves into species B, and species B into C,
the transitional species between B and C would be regarded as a “true” species
for its time, and would relate to the transitional species from A to B like a “true”
species, making A, B, and C merely “transitional” forms. We can expand that
problem even further. Species A and C, if they would for some reason meet each
other, might not be able to reproduce with each other, but the species B can
reproduce with both of them, making A, B and C one ring species across time. We
could trace that back to the very ancestors of all life. The species concept
does not work across time, I think. Just some thoughts.
