We do have a rough idea of how the postcranial morphology of the aurochs looked like in life, but the fact that soft tissue is not preserved gives room for quite some speculation. What the result of the reconstruction looks like also depends on what animals you use as a template for the reconstruction. I tend to avoid highly domesticated breeds for my reconstructions, because domestication has a dramatic impact on the morphology of cattle. If I use domestics as a template, it usually is Lidia, Corriente or feral cattle that I use.
But this time I wanted to pretend that the aurochs does not have living descendants and took a more or less distant (the aurochs does not have really close relatives among living wild bovines) relative among wild species as a template, the gaur. I wanted to reconstruct the Prejlerup bull, which is not only the largest more or less complete skeleton of the aurochs that we currently have, but also the bull with the coolest morphology. The massive skeleton with the well-developed muscle attachments suggests to me that this specimen at least was very muscular, quite like a gaur. So I looked not only at cave paintings and other artistic depictions of aurochs but also at the morphology of living gaurs. The basis for the reconstruction is this photo of the Prejlerup skeleton that my friend Markus Bühler sent me:
The skeleton is mounted rather accurately, only the hindlegs might be bent to much. Other than that, it is a very nice mount.
Looking at depictions from Dorogne, Lascaux and Chauvet and living gaur bulls, this is the result of my reconstruction:
I think it looks plausible and is not even very different from reconstructions where I used less-derived domestic cattle as a template.
My next couple of reconstructions will be another experiment: I will reconstruct them as if there were absolutely no living relatives of the aurochs, with only the skeletons and the contemporaneous artistic depictions as a guide.
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