Holocene Art

This is another one of my old posts at Carnivora that I've decided to move to my blog; in it, I argue that several of the Neolithic (and even Paleolithic) examples of rock art from the Indian subcontinent that depict humped bulls may actually be contemporary illustrations of the Indian aurochs; Naturally, I also argue that the Indian aurochs possessed a hump, as its domestic descendants, zebu cattle, do. Without further ado: OK, my apologies for the delay; I was both under-motivated and fairly busy with other things over the past two days, but, I can spare some time now. Here is a post compiling some example of Indian rock art which may show Bos namadicus. Before we begin looking at the images though its important to get some obvious caveats out of the way: 1. Most Indian rock art I have seen is quite minimalistic and done in profile view, and often it is not possible to determine conclusively exactly which species a particular glyph is supposed to represent. Between prehistory...

The Aurochs is well represented in the Quaternary fossil record, with numerous bone finds across Eurasia and Africa; however, there may only be a few dozen complete, fully articulated skeletons of this animal, either on display or in storage in institutions around the world. I have been trying to collect a list of as many mounted specimens as I  can,but the list is certainly still incomplete. If you have photos of any aurochs specimens not yet listed here that you wouldn't mind being published on this blog please let me know in the comments. Many aurochs skeletons on display are composites containing axial and appendicular elements from different individuals; In this list I've included only those mounts which I know to be based mostly on single individuals. This post will end up serving as an update to the post originally made by user Roberta on the now defunct Carnivora forum, for those viewers who are familiar. That extremely useful post unfortunately turns out to have omi...

A Deshi bull with wild type coat color. Deshi is an interesting zebu breed for more reasons than one...but more on that later. The Indian aurochs, like its European relative, has been extinct for quite some time. Unlike its's European relative however, the appearance of which is attested through several contemporary written and visual first hand accounts, we still do not have a clear picture of what the Indian aurochs actually looked like. There are, to my knowledge, no known representations which unequivocally represent the Indian aurochs, nor have any written first hand accounts of its appearance come to light. For this reason, we are left to turn to speculation, with an appeal to parsimony, to attempt to piece together the life appearance of this enigmatic creature. While there are several aspects of the phenotype of namadicus which we are unknown to us, in this post we will focus on one-coat colour. So what could the coat colour of Bos namadicus have been like? We...