Rachel
Another great article on the Atlas Obscura website about the projects working on recovering the auroch: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/aurochs-rewilding
I never knew about this!!!!!! Fascinating stuff!
When the Swedish armies descended upon Poland in 1655, they laid waste to the kingdom and pillaged whatever they could. Among the spoils stolen from the city of Jaktorów was one of King Sigismund III’s most prized possessions: an ornate drinking horn, longer than a grown man’s arm and as thick as an elephant tusk. Although the artistry was exquisite, the horn’s true value had little to do with the metal wrapped around its circumference. In life, the horn had belonged to the last aurochs bull, who died in 1621.
Today, the horn, which resides in Stockholm’s Royal Armoury, is one of the few surviving remnants of the wild cattle that roamed Eurasia and North Africa for more than 250,000 years. Like so many of Europe’s megafauna, the aurochs met their end at the hands of humans. Their horns were such coveted hunting trophies that by the Middle Ages, their numbers had already fallen. The species officially went extinct in 1627, when the last cow died in Poland.
