Aurochs Skeleton

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Complete Skeletons of the Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

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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 This post will end up serving as an update to the post originally made by user Roberta on the now defunct Carnivora forum, for those viewers who are familiar.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...
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The Aurochs in China

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  I have dubbed the skeleton above "the Jilin aurochs". It is the skeleton of a female,  found in Gan'an County in 1998,  and dated to between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. It is held at the Jilin Museum in   Changchun, China.   Another view of the Jilin Aurochs When I first saw this skeleton, I was immediately struck by how strange looking it is. The skull in particular has a very unusual character, it certainly doesn't look like any typical aurochs skull you would see in a western European museum. Through the magic of Google, I was able to find some more pictures of Chinese aurochs fossil material, and many of the skulls show showed the same unusual features as that of the Jilin aurochs. I wondered whether or not the apparent distinctiveness of these Chinese skulls was just an illusion, or if it had in fact been noted before, either in the literature or through the naming of separate subspecies.  Well as it turns out, there have been aurochs...
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Is this Really a Megaloceros?

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Picture from Don's Maps   The black stag is one of the most well known pieces of parietal art from the Lascaux caves. This iconic painting occupies a prominent position in a section of Lascaux known as the Axial Gallery. Many writers on the iconography of Lascaux refrain from assigning a particular species to this representation, "stag" being a generic term often used to refer to representations of deer in European cave art; however, in every instance I have seen where the black stag is suggested to represented a particular species, that species is invariably the extinct giant deer, Megaloceros giganteus . It's easy to see why this interpretation has so much traction, the antlers of the black stag are certainly large and imposing, and the size of the painting, especially compared to the smaller depictions of  deer found in the cave, suggests an animal of great bodily magnificence . However, I think a closer consideration of the particulars of the painting reveal...
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