What the Heck - I'm a-gonna Auroch your world, baby.
Whelp, I don't have much time to write this, as I've got to get to the RPGS meeting in 10 minutes, but I found this whilst surfing teh intarwebs, and it was just way too awesome for me not to blog about.
As you know, the earth is in the middle of a mass extinction event. Megafaunal species - always the first to suffer in such occasions - have been dying off left and right over the past 50,000 years. One of the more recent of these casualties was the Auroch, the European wild bull, sacred to the ancient Minoan civilization. So far as Science can determine, the species went extinct in 1627, when its last known member died in a royal forest in Poland.
However...
Even before the rize of Darwin's theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to scientific prominence, it was well known that the modern domestic cow is directly descended from the Auroch, produced from the primeval stock of that species by means of artificial selection. So, in the 1920s, two patriotic German zöologists, the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, ingeniously came to the conclusion that many of the traits which defined the Auroch must still be lurking in the genomes of the infinite varieties of domestic cow which wander around the globe. Acting on this deduction, they attempted to "breed back" the Auroch, creating a variety of wild cow which matches as closely as possible the known physiological & ecological properties of the ancient species. The result are the Heck Cattle, which have, in the past half-century, been released into many nature reserves throughout that Continent in an attempt to replace the lost Aurochs & re-invigorate its native ecosystems.
Re-invigorating your native ecosystems since 1986,
--mark
As you know, the earth is in the middle of a mass extinction event. Megafaunal species - always the first to suffer in such occasions - have been dying off left and right over the past 50,000 years. One of the more recent of these casualties was the Auroch, the European wild bull, sacred to the ancient Minoan civilization. So far as Science can determine, the species went extinct in 1627, when its last known member died in a royal forest in Poland.
However...
Even before the rize of Darwin's theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to scientific prominence, it was well known that the modern domestic cow is directly descended from the Auroch, produced from the primeval stock of that species by means of artificial selection. So, in the 1920s, two patriotic German zöologists, the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, ingeniously came to the conclusion that many of the traits which defined the Auroch must still be lurking in the genomes of the infinite varieties of domestic cow which wander around the globe. Acting on this deduction, they attempted to "breed back" the Auroch, creating a variety of wild cow which matches as closely as possible the known physiological & ecological properties of the ancient species. The result are the Heck Cattle, which have, in the past half-century, been released into many nature reserves throughout that Continent in an attempt to replace the lost Aurochs & re-invigorate its native ecosystems.
Re-invigorating your native ecosystems since 1986,
--mark