Europe’s super cow is back from the dead

Cattle are being bred to look like ancient aurochs, which may walk again for first time in 400 years

HAILED by Julius Caesar for their extraordinary size, and the subject of cave paintings dating back 17,000 years, the extinct aurochs have been described as the most important animals in the history of humankind.

Standing 6ft high at the shoulder and weighing more than a ton, aurochs are the ancestor of all cattle, and helped usher in an era of agriculture which sparked the birth of civilisation.

Now, after nearly 400 years, the enormous creature is on the verge of being brought back to life with help from Scottish Highland Cattle, in the hope that wild roaming herds could help restore lost ecosystems.

Since 2008, the Tauros programme in the Netherlands has been seeking out genetic traits of the aurochs from cattle scattered throughout Europe, with the goal of breeding them into a herd.

Researchers have scoured historical accounts and studied artworks to understand how the aurochs looked and behaved. Now the programme has a herd of around 350 to 400 animals.

Ronald Goderie, director of the Taurus Foundation, said: “What we see in our herds in terms of how they look is that they are slowly getting closer to the image we have in mind.

“But it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s also about de-domestication. The animals are performing more and more wild behaviour. We saw wonderful examples of that last summer when we have very high water levels along many rivers in the Netherlands.

“This resulted in a lot of autonomous behaviour such as swimming to dry places, which we had not seen in our herds up to that point. While we’re still in the process of actively breeding the animals, they are showing more and more signs of self-reliance.”

Aurochs were once present across the whole of Europe, but the last animal was recorded in a Polish forest in 1627.

The team has chosen to breed the features into cows, rather than using Jurassic Park-style editing techniques, so that the animals can be released into the wild. The scientists are hoping to reach a point where the cows could live on areas of 50,000 hectares without much human interference.

The new breed has been named tauros but it will be as close to the aurochs as possible, similar in temperament, genetics and appearance. Records show that the bulls were generally black with a white nose and a pale stripe running down the back, while cows were a reddish-brown-to-black hue.

Female aurochs lacked the enlarged udders that have been bred into modern dairy cattle, instead having the more modest teats needed to suckle just one calf at a time. Most of the animal’s mass was between its shoulders, to help it support huge horns.

The team got a huge helping hand in 2015 when the genome of an aurochs was sequenced giving them a blueprint with which to assess their candidate cattle and make sure they are on the right track. “We compared about 50 breeds and the ones we were using compared quite positively with the genome of the aurochs,” said Mr Goderie.

The team works with Rewilding Europe which aims to bring back species to national parks in Britain and the continent.