Return of the aurochs

Extinct since 1627, an ancient species of huge wild cattle could soon be back from the dead to graze on Scottish hillsides.

- James Fair

The first time Aidan Maccormick ever saw a tauros, he was at a breeding facility in the Netherlands. He doesn't quite describe it as a life-changing moment, but it certainly left a deep impression on him.

"There was this dominant bull wandering around and vocalising - it was annoyed because a younger bull was herding a couple of females away," Maccormick, who works for the Northwoods Rewilding Network, recalls. "Meanwhile, there were a couple of Exmoor pony stallions rearing up and fighting. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up; it was like going back in time - like looking at a cave painting."

The tauros - wild-looking, muscular beasts with long horns - were bred from domesticated cattle and genetically at least were nothing to get excited about. But what they resembled and how they were behaving? That's a different matter. That's because tauros cattle have been bred to resemble, as closely as possible, the extinct wild ancestor of all domestic cattle, the aurochs, an animal many people will recognise instinctively from the depictions drawn by our ancestors in caves such as Lascaux in the Dordogne some 20,000 years ago.

Of course, those Stone Age humans hunted the aurochs for food and over time became just too damn good at it. The prehistoric megafauna slowly disappeared, and their gradual extermination was further assisted as the hunters settled down and converted wild habitats into farmland.

LAST OF THE AUROCHS

By the modern historical age, the species had been wiped out from most of its original range of North Africa, Western Asia (as far east as India) and Europe, and was confined to Central Europe, where woodland clearances between the 9th and 12th centuries were more or less the last rites. The last-known female aurochs died in a Polish forest in 1627.