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It is the order to which all hoofed animals belong. There are several families in the order, one of which you already have learned about the Deer family. Now comes the family of Cattle and Sheep. It is called the Bovidae family, and the biggest and most important member is Thunderfoot the Bison, commonly called Buffalo.
They were discovered in a mass of DEBRIS of all kinds, forming a very hard conglomerate. Some teeth, which had belonged to animals of the bovidae, cervidae, and equidae groups, were got out with considerable difficulty, but the bones in the conglomerate were too touch broken up to be identified.
From the Long Barrows have been taken the skulls and feet of bovidae, and it is probable that the other parts of the body had been devoured by the assistants, and that the head and feet were placed in the tomb as an offering either to the dead or to the divinities who are supposed to have presided at the death.
Botocudos, mode of life of; disfigurement of the ears and lower lip of the. Boucher de Perthes, J.C. de, on the antiquity of man. Bourbon, proportion of the sexes in a species of Papilio from. Bourien on the marriage-customs of the savages of the Malay Archipelago. Bovidae, dewlaps of. Bower-birds, habits of the; ornamented playing-places of. Bows, use of.
So at last, group by group, we have gone through the ungulates, and the bisons alone are left, and as the American animal has short, incurved horns, set low down on the skull and far apart at the base; premaxillaries falling short of the nasals; the last cervical and the anterior dorsal vertebrae with spines; fourteen pairs of ribs, and a mane covering the shoulders, we conclude that it is a bison, and as the same characteristics with minor variations are shown by the European species, often, but wrongly, called "aurochs," we say that these two alone of existing Bovidae are bisons, with the yak as a somewhat questionable relative.
So, through this rapid survey, we have dropped out of the hoofed beasts all but the bovines and their near allies, and are thus far advanced toward our definition of a bison, but from this point we shall not find it easy to draw sharp distinctions, for while the Bovidae, as a whole, are well enough distinguished from all other animals, their characteristics are so much mixed among themselves that it is hardly possible to find any one or more striking features peculiar to one group, and for most of them recourse must be had to associations of a number of lesser characters.
Again, all the great groups of the Ruminants, the Bovidae, Antilopidae, Camelopardalidae, and Cervidae, are represented in the Miocene epoch, and so are the Camels. The Upper Eocene Anoplotherium, which is intercalary between the Pigs and the Tragulidae, has only two or, at most, three toes.
Gorals and serows belong to the subfamily Rupicaprinae which is an early mountain-living offshoot of the Bovidae; it also includes the chamois, takin, and the so-called Rocky Mountain goat of America. The animals are commonly referred to as "goat-antelopes" in order to express the intermediate position which they apparently hold between the goats and antelopes.
If we suppose that the fighting was slower and less fierce in the Bovidae, so that the skin over the exostosis was subject to friction but not lacerated, the result would be a thickening of the horny layer of the epidermis as we find it, and the fact that the skin and periosteum are not destroyed explains why the horns are not shed but permanent.
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