Muskox

The muskox Ovibos moschatus also spelled musk ox and musk-ox, in Inuktitut umingmak, is an Arctic mammal of the family Bovidae, noted for its thick coat and for the strong odor emitted during the seasonal rut by males, from which its name derives. This musky odor is used to attract females during mating season. Muskoxen primarily live in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, with small introduced populations in Sweden, Siberia, Norway, and Alaska.

As members of the subfamily Caprinae of the family Bovidae, muskoxen are more closely related to sheep and goats than to oxen; however, they are placed in their own genus, Ovibos Latin: sheep-ox. The muskox is one of the two largestextant members of Caprinae; along with the similarly sized takin. While takin and muskox were once considered possibly related, the takin lacks common ovibonine features, such as the muskox's specialized horn morphology, and genetic analysis shows that their lineages actually separated early in caprine 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. The vague similarity between takin and muskox must therefore be considered an exampl 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. Muskoxen 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. Later migration waves of Asian ungulates that included high-horned muskoxen reached Europe andNorth America during the first half of the Pleistocene.

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. Euceratherium was larger yet more lightly built than modern muskoxen, looking like a giant sheep with massive horns, and preferred hilly grasslands.
A 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. UnlikeEuceratherium, which survived in America down to 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.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.