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The once-extinct aurochs may soon roam Europe again
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago> Also noticeably absent in the Auerrind Project’s stock are Heck cattle, the striking, aggressive breed created in the 1920s by two German zoo directors, Heinz and Lutz Heck. Despite the lack of modern-day knowledge of genetics, the Heck brothers both claimed to have recreated aurochs through back-breeding. Heinz even wrote, “The wild bull, the aurochs, lives again.” Disturbingly, these early attempts at creating aurochs dovetailed with the fascist politics of the time. Lutz in particular, who was a member of the Nazi Party, convinced Hermann Göring that the return of ancient European beasts like aurochs and tarpan, or wild horses, fit with the the National Socialist Party’s ideological push to recreate an imagined European past. At least some of this is the background for the excellent movie “The Zookeeper’s Wife” starring Jessica Chastain
- mikequinlan 5y ago"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
- contingencies 5y ago"Hey, this is Unix. I know Unix!"
- Isamu 5y agoYes. Did anybody else cheer at this point in the theater? I mean, come on. At last your nerd skills enable you to save the day in an action motion picture. Get to your feet and cheer for the Unix prompt on a Connection Machine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
- teddyh 5y agoThe Unix prompt was on an SGI workstation. The Connection Machine did not run Unix, AFAIK.
- Isamu 5y agoI should explain I didn’t mean literally that you used the Connection Machine interactively. Supercomputers generally were treated as batch mode, with other machines scheduling jobs. I think you are right about the SGI workstation being used with the CM in the background. But still, I was disappointed that I was the only person in the theater that was stoked about Unix at the time.
- monocasa 5y agoAll of the CMs before the CM-5 were more accelerators than full systems of their own. They sort of look like 90s style GPUs to their host systems. Those host systems were either SunOS, Ultrix, or a Lisp machine. The CM-5 simply ran it's own Unix called CMost, and you'd generally rlogin into it from another Unix machine. In all these cases you could submit batch jobs with NQS (a unix batch system), but you could partition the machine and interactively access it as well, and at the same time as other users or batch jobs.
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- bitwize 5y agoJust an fyi, the singular of the beast's name is indeed "aurochs". Whoever titled this story for HN need not have corrected it.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoAlso, it's pronounced "our ox" (Ochs being German for ox, pronounced similarly), not "au-roch".
- mkl 5y agoNot to be confused with the similar-sounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx.
- JPLeRouzic 5y agoI know there is no reason languages have to be standardized and anyway I am not a native English speaker but Google translate renders different pronunciations (at least in my ears) for Oryx and Aurochs. Do English (and derivatives) natives agree that both words sound the same?
- nerdponx 5y agoI am a native American English speaker, and I would not expect them to sound the same. Why would they? However they are both unusual and unfamiliar, so people might get them confused anyway.
- ryanjshaw 5y ago"Oryx" is pronounced "are-ricks". Doesn't sound like "our ox".
- mkl 5y agoDepends on accent. In my NZ accent, "oryx" doesn't sound much like "are-ricks" at all. To me oryx and aurochs sound similar enough I can imagine people confusing one unfamiliar hoofed animal for the other.
- mhitza 5y agoNo thank you! Had an encounter with a standoffish bull last year in Spain, and not a fan of roaming bovines since.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoYep, while out on the hills I met a feral bull grazing on the only track around the impassable gorge. He wasn't keen to let me past, or hurry up, so I had to retreat and wait.
- AussieWog93 5y agoReminds me of the conflict between German farmers and the Goverment over whether or not wolves should be a protected species. Plenty of city-dwellers support all forms of biodiversity, as long as somebody else has to deal with the mess.
- vanderZwan 5y agoMeanwhile, every Italian I know laughs at how Northern Europeans react to wolves as if they're a big deal and something to be afraid of. They're not.
- Apocryphon 5y agoThe first step towards Jurassic Park
- melony 5y agoDo bigger cows taste better or are smaller ones the best?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mkoubaa 5y agoOne way to find out
- brezelgoring 5y agoDepends on how you like your meat, I guess. I hear that deer meat, that free-roam and are wild, is tight and bitter. Cow and chicken, that do not move much, tend to be tender, and fat-rich. I'd venture a guess and say its like deer meat, or maybe bear meat, which I tried once and was disgusting; tight, foul-y, and dry.
- Nursie 5y agoDeer meat (venison) is delicious. Not sure what you're on about there.
- smackeyacky 5y agoMight be referring to gaminess, I think it tends to put off people who are used to modern beef or lamb. It's still present in venison as they are less domesticated / more active than domestic cattle or sheep. I like it but it's definitely not to everyones taste (pun intended).
- wumpus 5y agoMy friends who hunt say that it really matters how terrified the animal is before you shoot it; the longer it lives, the worse the meat is.
- swiftcoder 5y ago> Cow and chicken, that do not move much, tend to be tender, and fat-rich They only don't move much because of intensive farming practices that pack them into small places to prevent movement (partly for cost efficiency, but also because Westerners have become accustomed to this mild flavour profile). If you let your cows and chickens range free and don't supplement their feed, they tend to be lean, heavily muscled, strongly flavoured, and often pretty damn tough.
- richard_todd 5y agoFun fact: Some people think the aurochs is the animal mistranslated as "unicorn" a few times in the King James Bible. Most newer translations just say "wild oxen" instead.
- mkoubaa 5y agoI would have assumed it was the Eurasian wooly whino
- dane-pgp 5y agoI'm not sure if "mistranslated" really captures the thought process that went into the King James Bible translation. While aurochs had died out in Britain thousands of years earlier, the legend of the unicorn (probably from Greek knowledge of the Indian rhinoceros) was alive and well throughout the Middle Ages, with distinctly religious symbolism attached. So, when faced with an unclear Hebrew word for an animal that no English speaker would have ever seen or heard of, and one that represented a wild, horned quadruped, the translators seemingly took the sensible choice of recycling a word that readers and listeners would be familiar with, at the expense of a taxonomic accuracy that was not available to them.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> when faced with an unclear Hebrew word I thought the King James Version was translated into English from Greek (which was translated from Hebrew). I mention it because, if true, the opportunity for “lost in translation” is greater.
- kadoban 5y agoI believe it was from a mix of Greek, Hebrew and a couple of others, mostly depending on which section. I couldn't say which bits these references would have been from. Yeah there's a _lot_ of room for mistranslations or just doing the best they could.
- edflsafoiewq 5y agoThe KJV is eclectic, but you're correct the rendering "unicorn" is from the Septuagint (monokeros).
- betwixthewires 5y agoWhy? I just don't see why you would want to do this. They're gone, leave them be.
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- kadoban 5y agoTo show that we can, and because some people want them. Bringing back species will be important as we lose more and more of them.
- betwixthewires 5y agoIt makes sense to bring back extinct species, to have the technological capability to do so, to get some practice in, but something that's been dead so long the environment in which it flourished has since adapted, that's what I don't get. Should we bring back every single species that has ever gone extinct? Or only every one that existed while humans are in the fossil record? What I think it comes down to is humans don't handle change well, but trying to make the earth stand still is a fools errand.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoThis is addressed in the article.
- mellavora 5y agoHmmm, I don't know how to express this without sounding threatening, and I really don't want that or to imagine that bad things were to happen to you. Your statement (which is a rather incomplete picture of you, granted), suggests that you don't see much of a connection between yourself and the rest of the living world. Easy enough trap to fall into, the connection is usually not conscious and few people pay attention to it. But when one does realize that one is in fact part of the world, the loss of a species is as tragic as a personal loss. Because it is. So, by analogy, say you had lost 2/3rds of your possessions due to some human-mediated act, and someone were to say to you "They are gone, leave them be, no need to restore them"... or, since possessions usually can be restored, say 1/4 of your closest friends and relatives were, oh, let's just say 'put into prison', to imply that they could be brought back, would the answer be "They are gone, leave them be. No need to have my friends and family back"? Or if that is still too removed, we could start talking about body parts. again, my apologies, I wish only good things for you and your loved ones. The thought of bad things happening to them is abhorrent. And so is the mass extinction that we are all participating in, myself included.
- cheese_goddess 5y agoA cow weighing a metric ton and a half and with horns almost 5 meters long? What could go wrong...?
- escapecharacter 5y agoBeef of Death
- flenserboy 5y agoIf you survive, you will enjoy that steak.
- euroderf 5y agoA TV show. One man and one aurochs enter an arena. Only one of them emerges alive. The name of the show: Steak Your Life.
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- EdwardDiego 5y agoBull cults everywhere again...
- TulliusCicero 5y agoLooks like 1500-2000 lbs is a more realistic estimate for more recent aurochs. That’s comparable to American bison.
- RamblingCTO 5y agoThat's 780-907kg if anyone's wondering. A metric ton is 1000kg.
- cheese_goddess 5y agoMy mistake- I misread lbs for kgs.
- themgt 5y agoMore information here[1]: Bovine-led biodiversity: For millions of years, European land has been grazed – by wild herbivores, and, far more recently, by domestic cattle. This grazing has kept parts of the land free from forest, providing open habitats that support a wide range of plants and animals. But today a decline in animal husbandry across Europe means these habitats, and their biodiversity, are in danger of disappearing. This is where the auroch, or its descendant – the so-called “Tauros” – comes in. Through selective breeding, Rewilding Europe and its partners want Tauros to occupy the niche the auroch once filled, keeping Europe’s rich mosaic of open landscapes flourishing through natural grazing. These are cow ancestors that went extinct in 1627 and had as little 0.12% genetic distance from current cow breeds. This sounds reminiscent of bison/wolf reintroduction or the more dramatic goal of bringing mammoths back to the tundra. I'm pretty near 100% supportive of all these efforts. The holocene has been an absolute catastrophe for megafauna and we're increasingly realizing this has had dramatically negative downstream consequences for other species and even landscape and climate. I find it really unserious the people comparing this to like, bringing back velociraptors and t-rex. They're being back-bred via existing cows, there's not even any "genetic engineering" as such. As far as I know no one's planning to reintroduce Smilodon to the Appalachian Trail - beyond maybe a few exceptions, I say bring back the megafauna. [1] https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-in-action/wildlife-comeback/tauros/ https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-in-action/wildlife-com...
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago> no one's planning to reintroduce Smilodon to the Appalachian Trail We could start a letter-writing campaign?
- jaggederest 5y agoI for one think humanity has gotten a little complacent at night. Put a little pep in your step watching for things with 11 inch canines.
- oblio 5y agoAmeericans for sure haven't. They have so many guns like they're living in the Cretaceous and humans are not the dominant species on the planet.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoI hope they are able to bring back the American Chestnut too. That tree isn't completely dead -- some stumps and shoots remain -- but adult trees never survive, due to a fungus that didn't used to exist in North America. There are now two programs to bring it back. One, by hybridizing with Japanese Chestnut and breeding to (hopefully) keep not much more than the Japanese tree's blight resistance. And another -- more controversially but maybe actually better -- that adds to the American Chestnut genome a single gene, from wheat, that confers resistance to the fungus. These latter trees would be even more like the originals. The hybrid program has some test sites now in the wild. The GMO version has not been approved, but I hope it will be.
- throwawaygal7 5y agoReleasing GMO chestnuts will contaminant the gene pool forever, it's a bad idea. Two things about the American chestnut are relevant: 1) the percentage of forest it occupied is widely overstated, seemingly due to exageration thru retelling of the story. It was usually a top ten tree at most sites, far from the numbers you usually see in articles. The these numbers are from ideal sites for its colonization or areas where it was planted by humans. This is widely known and studied, but people who write about it to lay audiences tend to use exaggerated figures out of context. 2) many specimens survived the blight due to partial resistance, not all were wiped out. All we need to do is wait and they'll do just fine. Even a traditional breeding program would work in a few generations, there's really no good reason to rush this stuff.
- trash3 5y agoAll we need to do to fix climate change is wait as well ;)
- sojournerc 5y agoWhat are you winking at? Cheeky comment, but thread was about trees... You just trying to flame war?
- hobs 5y ago
- fristechill 5y agoI hope we can also revive the 'northern penguin', also known as the Great Auk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbXk7NldnM#t=18m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbXk7NldnM#t=18m
- adam_arthur 5y agoI won't be satisfied until we can grow auroch meat in the lab
- Thorrez 5y ago>“The distance from the aurochs to the Pajuna cattle from Spain is just 0.12 percent, so there is more than a 98 percent overlap.” Is that a math error? 100%-0.12% = 99.88%. Should it have said "more than a 99% overlap" or "more than a 99.8% overlap"? I guess more than 98% overlap is still technically true.
- snthpy 5y agoCame here to say the same thing.
- shmageggy 5y agoLooking up "genetic distance" it seems there are many different measures, all seemingly expressing something more sophisticated than raw overlap. Perhaps the .12% is referring to something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
- gilrain 5y agoYou are assuming you know what “distance” means in this context, and appear to have decided it means the same as mathematical subtraction. You are likely mistaken.
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- zelienople 5y ago"You will be eaten by an aurochs. We don't know what that means."
- tomcam 5y agoThere is at least one large elk herd here in the Seattle suburbs. Elk are so big close up that they feel like an alien species. And these would be much larger. Nothing wrong with a dose of humility here and there.
- elevaet 5y agoHave you ever been near a moose? I almost hit one when it charged out of the bush while I was diving a backroad. It swerved at the last minute and ran alongside my car for about 10s. All I could see out the side window was its legs, felt like being next to a dinosaur.
- tomcam 5y agoYes, in Anchorage, Alaska, just sauntering around like it owned the place. And they are indeed much larger than elk. Now that you mention it, I’m not sure even Australia has anything as crazy as moose.
- jamiek88 5y ago> sauntering around like it owned the place They do!
- kwhitefoot 5y agoYou meet elk in the woods here in Norway occasionally. You don't even need to be far from the centre town. I was walking in the hills above Drammen one midsummer night and found myself suddenly about two metres from one, not sure which of us was the most surprised; we stared at each other for a few moments and then it lumbered off through the woods.
- ejolto 5y ago> You meet elk in the woods here in Norway occasionally. Those are moose not elk, the Norwegian word elg translates to moose in english. Elk is a species of large North-American deer (hjort). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk
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- dalbasal 5y agoAre there back breeding examples for species that still exist in the wild? Say domestic sheep? If a back breeding projects target appearance, does behaviour generally follow behaviour serendipitously? Will these behave like aurochs?