Bovids are half of all living ungulate diversity
Cattle, bison, buffalo, antelopes, sheep, and goats share one family: Bovidae. Its 143 living and 300 extinct species make up nearly fifty-five percent of ungulate diversity, with peak variety on East Africa's savannas, and its members range from the towering gaur to the tiny royal antelope.
Bovids are cloven-hoofed ruminants named by John Edward Gray in 1821 from Latin bos, ox. They sit in Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Fur color and body size vary widely. Except some domestic breeds, males carry two or more horns, and females often do too; horns are permanent bone cores sheathed in keratin, not annually shed antlers. Sizes span an enormous range: a gaur can top 1,500 kilograms and stand 2.2 metres at the shoulder, while the royal antelope is 25 centimetres tall and weighs at most 3 kilograms.
Most are day-active, feeding and socializing hardest at dawn and dusk and resting midday and night. Societies range from solitary to highly gregarious, communicating with scent, sound, and posture. Africa holds the greatest species richness, especially eastern savannas, with further taxa in Europe, Asia, and North America. Worldwide domesticates include cattle, sheep, and goats among others. The first bovids, small gazelle-like woodland animals, lived in Africa and Eurasia about 20 million years ago; around 10 million years ago a late Miocene burst produced some 70 new genera as many adapted to open grassland.
Molecular work supports Bovidae as a natural monophyletic group, though authors still argue whether to recognize as many as ten or as few as two subfamilies. Early twenty-first-century genetics also rearranged neighbors such as musk deer relative to true deer. In 1992 Alan Gentry of London's Natural History Museum sorted the major subfamilies into two clades: Boodontia, containing only the Bovinae, and Aegodontia for all the rest.
Source: Bovidae
