Coolidge Reports Addition of New Fossil To Museum Collection; Kouprey Ancestor of Cow

Harvard has another "living fossil" and it's not a member of the faculty. A report published by Harold J. Coolidge, Assistant Curator of Mammals, in the Harvard Museum Monograph today, indicates that the specimen of a wild ox or kouprey presented to the museum last year is an entirely new genus close to the ancestral line of modern domestic cattle.

The Harvard kouprey, an old adult bull, was shot by Mr. Francois Edmond-Blanc, member of a Franco-American scientific expedition to Indo-China. The ox was presented to the Museum of Comparative Zoology by James C. Greenway, Jr. of the Museum staff, who was also a member of the expedition.

The newly discovered ox possesses extremely primitive physical features which place the animal close to the ancient ancestral line of modern domestic cattle and as a form which probably branched off the main cattle family stem, before the bison, yak, zebu, gaur, and bantin about ten million years back, in the middle pliocene period.

Scientists interested in tracing the development and spread of modern domesticated cattle have long sought such evolutionary records as are found in the kouprey, but had hoped best to discover such records in fossils, Mr. Coolidge reported. Finding such a form still surviving in its native habitat is of striking scientific interest.

The paper reports an estimate of only about one thousand head of kouprey still surviving in the forests of southern Indo-China, which means that this scientifically important genus will probably become extinct unless immediate government protection is provided.

It is very unusual for so primitive a form to survive without a completely isolated habitat, such as an island, but the jungle area inhabitated by the kouprey is comparatively little hunted by white men, Mr. Coolidge states.

The kouprey is the first new genus of large living mammal to be discovered since the Okapi was found by Sir Harry Johnston in the Belgian Congo in 1900.