🦬 Higg's Bison 🦬

No, there's no typo in the title! Yes there's actually an established "higg's bison" term, or more like a nickname, which of course is play on the infamous higg's boson.

Although not a recognized subspecies (yet!) of bison, the nickname has been given to a hypothesized extinct species, the existance of which is theorized by genetic analysis... much like how the Higg's boson was theorized before it was actually discovered.

This bison was likely a hybrid between two extinct species, the steppe bison (ancestor of American bison) and the aurochs (an extinct type of wild cattle).

We use complete ancient mitochondrial genomes and genome-wide nuclear DNA surveys to reveal that the wisent is the product of hybridization between the extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus) and ancestors of modern cattle (aurochs, Bos primigenius) before 120 kya, and contains up to 10% aurochs genomic ancestry. source

The little evidence for the Higgs bison comes from ancient bison bones found in caves across Europe, including the famous Lascaux cave in France. And by ancient we talking around 100 thousand years ancient!

Lascaux Caves - Prehistoric Paintings source

But how did these bison / cow hybrids actually look like?

Well researchers have found the answer to this question in... European cave art where the primitive peeps would often use two distinct morphologies to paint bisons, one for the steppe bison and one for the Higg's Bison 🦬

Anyways, this is just the super quick run down. The actual paper on the thing is pretty interesting and you can click here if you want give it a read. Or here for a dumbed down version.

And here's a video by two of the researchers on the subject

Copy paste if video embed doesn't work

Ok friends, this is it for today! This is something I first heard on reddit a couple hours ago and thought would make an interesting post. Hope you liked it 😁

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