Zoo Babies: Bison

Today, in honor of the birthday of Kevyn Llewellyn, we are going to be looking at a few photos of a baby bison born about this time last year at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois.  Although frequently incorrectly referred to as buffalo, they are simply different animals, despite the outward similarities between the two groups.  If you see something that looks like it could be either a buffalo or a bison, there is a very, very good bet that you are looking at a bison.  Unless something very strange has happened, and in that case, you will be excused for looking foolish when it comes to your knowledge of the bovids.

Anyways, the bison, despite their once immense numbers (numbering in the tens of millions), were hunted almost to extinction in the 1800s, but have made a stunning comeback, with about 20,000 living in protected areas such as National Parks, and a further 500,000 living on tribal lands and ranches.  Nevertheless, their range is vastly reduced from what it once was.  Many people have come to the aid of the bison over the years, including Theodore Roosevelt and a man named William Hornaday, who together co-founded the American Bison Society at the Bronx Zoo in New York in 1905 in order to help protect these wild creatures. Today, they are labeled as "Near Threatened" by the IUCN due to these conservation efforts. 

Today, the bison is the largest North American mammal, but it wasn't always this way.  In fact, it wasn't always even the largest member of the genus Bison in North America!  Ancient ancestors of the North American bison have been traced by paleontologists to southern Asia to about 400,000 years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch.  Once the bison managed to make it across the land bridge into North America, it diversified and evolved.  One species, Bison latifrons, had a horn-span of a whopping nine feet!  Another species, Bison occidentalis (of which I have a scapula!) is thought to be the direct descendant of the modern bison, and evolved sometime during the late Pleistocene Epoch.

While talking bison with Dr. Robert Bakker and Matt Mossbrucker at the Morrison Natural History Museum, I learned that if you are looking at postcranial elements of a fossil bison (that is fossilized bones from behind the head), they are almost impossible to differentiate from each other.  Not only that, but they are extraordinarily difficult to differentiate from cows, too!  As a matter of fact, the species barrier is quite tentative between the bison and domestic cattle, resulting in the domestication of some bison, as well as hybrids, such as beefalo and cattalo.

Photo credit for all of the photos used in this post goes to the website for ZooBorns.  If you like what you are reading, please feel free to follow us here or via Facebook!  And remember, if you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!

Animal Spotlight: Aurochs

This post is the birthday post of Govind Kamath!  Happy birthday, Mr. Kamath!  If you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!

Over the years, you may have pondered, "Where does my burger come from?"  You probably just meant where was the cow that it came from.  But now here is something else for you to ponder.  Where the heck did the cow even come from?  Do you ever just see wild, black and white cows?  Well, I am here to tell you all about the evolution of the cow.

A Watusi/Longhorn pileup!  They actually crashed into each other, though!  Trust me, I was there, you can even see my sweatshirted elbow in the mirror thingy!

During the Pliocene Epoch, from around 5 to 2 MYA, the planet went through a cooler spell.  The frequent ice ages were a part of this cool spell, as was the most frequent Ice Age.  This colder weather caused many of the worlds forests to decrease in area, which in turn caused the world's grasslands to expand.  This led to the evolution of many large grazing animals, and helped contribute to the Pleistocene Megafauna, often called the Ice Age Megafauna.  One of these large animals that evolved was the Aurochs.

The Aurochs (Bos primigenius), first became domesticated during the Neolithic Age, or the "New Stone Age," probably around 12,000 years ago.  As a matter of fact, two waves of domestication occurred.  As you can see in the map below, there were three different subspecies of the Aurochs; one in northern Africa; one for Europe and Asia; and a third for the mysterious subcontinent of India, as Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali says in "The Big Bang Theory."  The two different domestications happened with the Eurasian subspecies, Bos primigenius primigenius, and the Indian subspecies, B. p. namadicus. 

These two different domestications of these two different species of cattle led to two different domesticated cattle!  In India, we have the Zebu cattle, which has been given its own scientific subspecies name, Bos primigenius indicus.  The other, Eurasian kind has become the cow that we know today from driving down the street and the Chik-fil-A ads.  While other types of bovines (members of the family Bovidae, a group of ungulates that includes water and African buffalo, yaks, bison, and, of course, cattle) have been domesticated throughout the years, specifically the water buffalo, the south-east Asian Banteng, and the Indian Gaur, it is cattle that have remained the most widely used, for a wide variety of purposes, too.

The Aurochs is now extinct.  The very last recorded female passed away in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland.

There are two particularly interesting breeds of domesticated cattle that I would like to now draw to your attention.  Back in December of 2011 on our trip down to Texas to visit my gramma, on the same trip where we visited the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country and saw the Acrocanthosaurus footprints, we also visited the San Antonio Zoo, as well as the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch near San Antonio.  This is an awesome place for EVERYONE to visit!  You get to roll down your windows as you drive through a park chock-full of deer, antelope, zebra, and bovines, and you get to drop food for them!  There are also three members of the order Struthioniformes (aka the ratites), like the South American rhea, the Australian emu, and, most terrifying of all, the African ostrich.  The ostriches was absolutely terrifying, and I will talk about them in a later blog post!  But also at the ranch they had two pretty crazy types of cattle!

The first was the Ankole-Watusi, often called simply the Ankole cattle or the Watusi.  Originally bred in Africa, the Watusi was named after the Watusi tribesmen (now the Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi).  This type of cattle has enormous horns that can span over six feet!  Both genders have these horns, and they can grow from between 1,500 - 1,800 pounds!  Below are some pictures that my family and I took of the cattle walking by our car!

A Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

Another Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

A baby Watusi!  HOW CUTE!

The second crazy type of cattle is the Texas Longhorn.  The Texas longhorn is, of course, native to the Lone Star State, and reports of the longhorn enduring thirst while still being able to fight off packs of wolves, as well as bears (presumably grizzly bears), from the pioneer times is not uncommon.  The longhorn, like the Watusi, also has six foot horns possessed by both sexes.  According to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch Adventure Guide Book, the longhorn "helped form the basis of the ranching industry of the American West during the 19th century."

A Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

Another Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

The aftermath of the Watusi/Longhorn pileup seen above!

Whoever said cows weren't interesting!

The Komodo Dragon: Deadly Drooler or Poisonous Predator?

The Komodo dragon (labeled "Vulnerable" by the IUCN) has long had the title of "World's Deadliest Drooler."  Native only to the Komodo Islands in Indonesia, The story went that the Komodo would bite its prey and let it slowly die, eaten away from the inside out by all of the deadly bacteria that fermented in its mouth.  It ends up that this story, as that is all it is, a story, originated from just one or two accounts of the creature almost a century or so ago, and that they were based almost entirely upon observation.  After these accounts were made public, more and more researchers and scientists tagged on to this idea until, eventually, it was a scientifically accepted fact.

Further support for this hypothesis was observations of Komodos biting buffalo, a main food source, and simply hanging around for days, weeks, and (I believe) on at least one occasion, a month.  Scientists believed that the animals would slowly succumb to the copious amounts of bacteria that were at home in the mouth of the worlds largest extant lizard. 

While it is true that the mouth of the Komodo dragon was, in fact, home to a number of very virulent strains of bacteria, it seems that there are other players at work.  A group of scientists noticed that the Komodo dragon, and other closely related monitor lizards, all had interesting bulges in the sides of their mouths.  These bulges they thought resembled those seen in the Gila monster, one of just two lizards that were previously known to have venom, the other being Mexico's beaded lizard.  Komodo skulls are hard to get a hold of, however, and it wasn't until 2009 that the team of researchers were finally able to get ahold of a Komodo dragon skull to put through an MRI machine.  The MRI scan showed that the Komodo did indeed have venom glands.  Although the venom appeared not to be deadly, it was potent enough to act as a sedative.  This, the team concluded, was how the Komodo would kill its victims: sedate them with its mildly potent venom, and then finish them off when they were slow and torporous. 

This didn't explain why it sometimes took weeks for Komodos to finish off a buffalo.  Kurt Schwenk believes it is because the Komodos often don't want to risk life and limb.  So what they do is they bite their victims, and let a combination of shock and bloodloss do the trick.  As the prey slowly starves, being surrounded by Komodo dragons and unable to retreat anywhere, more and more Komodos congregate in preparation of the coming feast.  And given their slow metabolic rates, they can afford to wait, too: unlike a lion or a cheetah, they are in no hurry to finish off their prey, and see no reason to take unnecessary risks to finish off the prey.

While all of this research is highly disputed, and subject to many different points of interpretation, it does seem like the idea of the Komodo killing by its toxic drool is indeed false, although only future research will decide all of this for certain.