Sheep-ox of the Arctic, not an ox at all
Ovibos moschatus—the muskox—wears a dense Arctic coat and earns its name from the rutting male’s strong odor that draws females. Woods Cree calls translate as “ugly moose” or “ugly bison.” Closer to sheep and goats than to cattle, it anchors its own genus Ovibos—“sheep-ox.”
Today most live in Greenland, in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut of Arctic Canada, and in Alaska, though the species once roamed Eurasia too. Its Inuktitut name is umingmak. Classification puts it among the ovibovines within the goat-and-sheep tribe Caprini, inside the bovid subfamily Antilopinae.
Takin comparisons once tempted anatomists, but shared traits fail and genetics split the lineages early among caprines; other ovibovines are nearer kin. Horn architecture is part of the muskox’s specialised look.
Its lineage began in temperate Asia and only late adapted to tundra. The shrub-ox Euceratherium crossed an early Bering land bridge about two million years ago, and modern Ovibos appeared in Germany almost a million years ago, reaching Britain by the Mindel glaciation some 500,000 years ago. Today's animals descend from muskoxen that crossed from Siberia to North America sometime from 200,000 to 90,000 years ago. Along with bison and pronghorn, it is one of the few North American Pleistocene giants to survive the extinctions at the end of the Ice Age, probably by sheltering in ice-free refuges.
Both sexes grow long curved horns. Adults stand 1.1 to 1.5 metres at the withers; females measure 135 to 200 centimetres long and males 200 to 250. They can run at 60 kilometres an hour and live 12 to 20 years. Alaska has farms that harvest their soft underwool, qiviut, prized for insulation. After the Laurentide ice sheet melted they spread north through the Canadian islands, reaching Greenland from Ellesmere Island around 350 AD.
Source: Muskox
