What was the wild ancestor of cattle?
Cattle were first domesticated around 10,500 years ago, but today there are no wild cattle. What was the wild ancestor of the cow?
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Large Hunters Dominated the Pleistocene
For years, evolutionary biologists have wondered about the ecosystems of the Pleistocene epoch. How did so many species of huge, hungry herbivores, such as mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths, not wipe out the plant life? Observations of modern elephants suggest that large concentrations of those animals could have essentially destroyed the environment, but they didn’t. Now, life scientists believe that the ecosystem was kept in balance by predatory carnivores that kept the population of large herbivores in check. Scientists have found fossil evidence of intense, violent attacks by packs…
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Extinct Bison Found Frozen in Siberia
Many large mammals went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age (approx 11,000 years ago), including the Steppe bison, or Bison priscus. A team of scientists has found a complete specimen of this extinct bison frozen and naturally mummified in Eastern Siberia. According to the research team, they have uncovered the most complete frozen mummy of the Steppe bison ever found. The frozen body has been dated to 9,300 years before the present day. It was found in the Yana-Indigirka Lowland and the team performed a necropsy to reveal how…
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