In the nineteenth century, European savants sought to reconstruct the history of the earth. The character of the evidence was routinely faunal, utilizing ossified organisms. Such methods built upon Georges Cuvier’s concept of a natural hierarchy of animal functions, which designated specific anatomical parts as more effective in determining animal relatedness and identification. Often the highest in the hierarchy were the anatomical structures associated with life-giving processes, and not the more superfluous or external characteristics of an animal. Horns and hoofs were therefore low on the hierarchy. Despite this, naturalists continued to posit the connection between such external characteristics of extinct organisms and their surrounding environments. In Europe and India, naturalists tested the fidelity between external morphological structures of living animals and specific environments in the present, in order to apply those associations to the past, a practice not wholly dissimilar from the modern field of ecomorphology. In this paper I focus on such investigations into the fossil remains of a long-extinct animal – the ancestral taurine cow, or the aurochs. The aurochs featured prominently in attempts to set a global geological clock, and the horns and hoof bones of those extinct beasts aided European naturalists in reconstructing ancient environments, the age of the Himalayas, and bovine evolutionary history.
