The gaur is the largest wild cattle still walking Earth
Bos gaurus, also called the Indian bison, tops every living bovid. IUCN has listed it Vulnerable since 1986, and a 2016 estimate capped mature animals at about 21,000, most of them in India. Shoulders can rise roughly twelve centimetres above the rump.
A high convex ridge between the horns and a muscular back ridge give the gaur its unmistakable profile. Adult bulls darken toward black with age, while cows and younger males stay paler, sometimes with a rufous cast in dry country. Horns of both sexes curve upward from the sides of the head, pale green or yellow for most of their length with black tips, and can reach sixty to one hundred fifteen centimetres. Head-and-body length runs two hundred fifty to three hundred thirty centimetres; shoulder height averages about one hundred sixty-eight centimetres in females and one hundred eighty-eight in males.
Body mass spans roughly four hundred forty to one thousand kilograms in adult females and five hundred eighty-eight to fifteen hundred in males. In one Indian sample of thirteen animals, males averaged about fifteen hundred kilograms and females a median near seven hundred. The domestic gayal or mithun arose partly from wild gaur and remains common along Northeast India's borders with Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Yunnan. Within Bos, the closest kin are the banteng and the probably extinct kouprey.
Historically the species ranged across mainland South and Southeast Asia; today's map is broken into scraps, and Malaysia's peninsula plus Sri Lanka no longer hold any. It favours large forest tracts with water and forage below about fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred metres, though records climb to at least twenty-eight hundred metres. In 2016 analysts judged Indochina and Malaysia had lost more than seventy percent of animals over three generations of twenty-four to thirty years, while herds in well-protected parks looked steadier. Undisturbed herds are mostly diurnal; where people press the forest, they turn nocturnal.
Source: Gaur
