Two new aurochs head busts based on actual skulls

Recently I finished two aurochs head busts I have been working on over the last couple of weeks. They represent the Ilford (= London) skull and a skull from the Natural history Museum whose age and location I do not know. Both skulls are available as 3d scans on sketchfab, which was great for my reconstructions.

 

based on the NHM skull

based on the Ilford skull

How I reconstructed them

 

As usual, I started with trying to accurately reproduce the skulls. I decided to make the skull 20 cm long, which is quite a handy size for the busts that still enables much detail. Then I started sculpting the eyes, nasal cartilage, lips and facial muscles around the skulls. Next step was to accurately reproduce the shape of the horn cores, and then adding the keratinous sheaths, which involves guesswork. While the horn sheaths of the Ilford skull were pretty straightforward to infer from the cores, that of the NHM skull was more tricky because the tips of the cores face forwards, not inwards as usual in aurochs. It could be the case that the keratinous sheaths were not long and did not create inwards-curving horn shapes in life, or that the sheaths were rather long, long enough to create the inwards curve. I chose latter option because the relation between the solidly keratinous part of the horn and the horn core seems to have been highly variable in aurochs and seems to be generally that way in bovines.

After sculpting the horns, the next step was to sculpt the skin and fur.

 

Why two of them

 

I chose to reconstruct two aurochs bulls to show the intraspecific variation. The Ilford skull is very massive and robust in morphology, perhaps from a very old bull, while the NHM skull is more filigree in comparison. It shows that the aurochs was quite variable in some aspects of its morphology and by fabricating two busts I wanted to show that. To add a female, I am going to make a bust based on the Sassenberg cow in the future.

 

 

How did the results work out?

 

I am quite satisfied with the results. I think I did not underestimate the soft tissue this time, in the case of the nose of the Ilford specimen I might even have overestimated it. The Ilford reconstruction has eyes that appear surprisingly large compared to one would guess from the skull alone. I think the curly hair on the forehead turned out to be quite realistic, although I could have made the hair even longer and shaggier in at least one of them considering what historic texts say.

 

What remains a speculation

 

The exact extent of the keratinous sheath in life cannot be derived from the bones and therefore remains a speculation. The extent of the white muzzle ring probably also varied among aurochs bulls, with some having virtually none and some having it fully expressed as in my reconstruction of the NHM skull.

 

Here are my head busts next to each other:

 

 

I call them Ozzy and Lemmy.