![]() ![]() Praeovibos was a highly adaptable animal that appears associated with cold tundra ( reindeer) and temperate woodland ( red deer) faunas alike. The low-horned Praeovibos was present in Europe and the Mediterranean 1.5 million years ago, colonized Alaska and the Yukon one million years ago and disappeared half a million years ago. Unlike Euceratherium, which survived in America until the Pleistocene- Holocene extinction event, Soergelia was a lowland dweller that disappeared fairly early, displaced by more advanced ungulates, such as the "giant muskox" Praeovibos (literally "before Ovibos"). Euceratherium was larger yet more lightly built than modern muskoxen, resembling a giant sheep with massive horns, and preferred hilly grasslands.Ī genus with intermediate horns, Soergelia, inhabited Eurasia in the early Pleistocene, from Spain to Siberia, and crossed to North America during the Irvingtonian (1.8 million years to 240,000 years ago), soon after Euceratherium. The first well known muskox, the "shrub-ox" Euceratherium, crossed to North America over an early version of the Bering Land Bridge two million years ago and prospered in the American southwest and Mexico. Later migration waves of Asian ungulates that included high-horned muskoxen reached Europe and North America during the first half of the Pleistocene. Muskox ancestors with sheep-like high-positioned horns (horn cores being mostly over the plane of the frontal bones, rather than below them as in modern muskoxen) first left the temperate forests for the developing grasslands of Central Asia during the Pliocene, expanding into Siberia and the rest of northern Eurasia. The modern muskox is the last member of a line of ovibovines that first evolved in temperate regions of Asia and adapted to a cold tundra environment late in its evolutionary history. Fossil history and extinct relatives Euceratherium skeleton (missing its ribs) The vague similarity between takin and muskox is therefore an example of convergent evolution. Instead, the muskox's closest living relatives appear to be the gorals of the genus Naemorhedus, nowadays common in many countries of central and east Asia. While the takin and muskox were once considered possibly closely related, the takin lacks common ovibovine features, such as the muskox's specialized horn morphology, and genetic analysis shows that their lineages actually separated early in caprine evolution. It is one of the two largest extant members of the caprines, along with the similarly sized Takin Budorcas. It is therefore more closely related to sheep and goats than to oxen it is placed in its own genus, Ovibos ( Latin: "sheep-ox"). The muskox is in the subtribe Ovibovina (or tribe Ovibovini) in the tribe Caprini (or subfamily Caprinae) of the subfamily Antilopinae in the family Bovidae. In historic times, muskoxen primarily lived in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, They were formerly present in Eurasia, with their youngest natural records in the region dating to around 2,700 years ago, with reintroduced populations in the American state of Alaska, the Canadian territory of Yukon, and Siberia, and an introduced population in Norway, part of which emigrated to Sweden, where a small population now lives.Įvolution Extant relatives Its Woods Cree names "mâthi-môs" and "mâthi-mostos" translate to "ugly moose" and "ugly bison", respectively. Its Inuktitut name "umingmak" translates to "the bearded one". This musky odor has the effect of attracting females during mating season. Native to the Arctic, it is noted for its thick coat and for the strong odor emitted by males during the seasonal rut, from which its name derives. The muskox ( Ovibos moschatus, in Latin "musky sheep-ox"), also spelled musk ox and musk-ox, plural muskoxen or musk oxen (in Inuktitut: ᐅᒥᖕᒪᒃ, romanized: umingmak in Woods Cree: ᒫᖨᒨᐢ, romanized: mâthi-môs, ᒫᖨᒧᐢᑐᐢ, mâthi-mostos), is a hoofed mammal of the family Bovidae. Ovibos pallantis Hamilton-Smith, 1827.Bosovis moschatus (Zimmermann, 1780) Kowarzik, 1911.Range map: blue indicates areas where muskox reintroduction has been attempted in the 20th century red indicates the previous established range. ![]()
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