Inscribed on rocks along the riverbanks in Portugal’s Côa Valley are figures of wild horses and aurochs — the common ancestor to all domestic cattle breeds — drawn by Paleolithic hunters tens of thousands of years ago. Archaeologists scrambled to protect these petroglyphs in the 1990s, as the Portuguese government planned to flood the valley behind a giant dam. Within four years, Côa was listed as a United Nations World Heritage Site, ensuring that this record of prehistoric megafauna would survive. All that was missing was the wildlife itself.
Ronald Goderie intends to fill that void. A cattle breeder trained in ecology, he’s working to reintroduce aurochs to the Côa Valley. The problem is that the aurochs, Bos primigenius, has been extinct since 1627.
Goderie isn’t concerned. To revive the aurochs, he’s collaborating with geneticists at Wageningen University and ecologists at a non-governmental organization called Rewilding Europe. Together they’re “back-breeding” modern cattle to take on aurochs-like traits — like menacing horns and stripes along their backs — and then introducing herds of these doppelganger herbivores into landscapes where aurochs once roamed.
The project may seem whimsical, but there are serious ecological reasons for bringing aurochs back onto the scene. “Agricultural land is being abandoned on a large scale in Europe, and natural grazing is one of the key processes for preserving biodiversity,” says Goderie. “We’re trying to re-establish a wild bovine that can do the job. To be able to do this as well as possible, we think these cattle should resemble the aurochs as much as possible.”
