Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivors’ Tale

STUBBORN A holdover from the Pleistocene era, the musk ox has managed to hang on while most of its brethren disappeared at the end of the last ice age.

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: December 13, 2010
Among the various large, charismatic and visibly winterized mammals that one might choose as a mascot for life in the Arctic belt, polar bears are, let’s face it, too hackneyed, reindeer too Rudolph, caribou too Sarah Palin’s target practice, and woolly mammoths too extinct.

There’s a better choice, though few may have heard of it. According to Arctic biologists, the quintessential example of megafaunal fortitude in the face of really bad weather is the musk ox, or Ovibos moschatus, a blocky, short-legged, highly social ungulate with distinctively curved horns and long hair that looks like shag carpeting circa 1975. More

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