I’m looking for stuff about aurochs on google, and having a weird time of it. Most of the stuff seems to just be references to the auroch as a monster in certain role-playing game systems, which in and of itself, is interesting, that the image of this creature lives on in that kind of world. Something else interesting I found was a page in French about the auroch, which I used my trusty google toolbar to have translated to english.

Here’s some of the interesting parts (I like how its such a weird translation):

Still called Urus by the Latin people, it is the wild ox which drove out our ancestors. … These powerful and savage animals lived in small troops in the areas of clear forest and along the rivers. … Today, one tried to reconstitute the species by crossing parents belonging to the races which appear most primitive: “aurochs thus obtained currently reproduce in certain parks, but it is not of course step about the fossil species, Bos primigenius.

Hm, and this might be a picture of an auroch from Lascaux?

Why is there so much stuff about aurochs in French? Peculiar, I tell you, peculiar.

This seems interesting…

Although Aurochs seem to have become extinct in England at least 2,500 BP, they may have survived in places like Caithness until the 9 th or 10 th century AD. The last Auroch died in 1627 in a Polish park, but primitive races of cattle still live in the Scottish Highlands. There are also herds of wild white cattle in places such as Chillingham in Northumberland.

I was sitting here before thinking, auroch, auroch, why does this seem familiar, and then I remembered about the musk ox, which is this huge long-haired bovine type thing that lives around the arctic circle or something, and I used to really be into it when I was a kid, and was all about animals and stuff. Let’s see what that link says about them… It says they aren’t oxen at all, and aren’t really even related to bison, but more closely to goats and sheep. Weird! Apparently, they also produce a wool called “qiviut” which is eight times warmer than sheeps wool!

Hm, well this all seems vastly interesting to me right now for some reason. Go figure…