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SciShow 9 Jul 2026 35 here now

Why Are There No Wild Cows?

While you may not be able to bring the aurochs back, you can show off your appreciation for them by picking up one of our new aurochs shirts, inspired by the cave paintings found at Lascaux in France.

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having grown up in the 80s/90s when all the nature documentaries were in Africa, India, the Amazon or the ocean and they all kind of supported this narrative of "we need to protect these far away places of wild nature where locals aren't doing it right" (pause for gag reaction) and besides their hold-over colonial paradigm also relied heavily on exotification and "nature is separate from humans": I am always happy to see programming that talks about the wild life in North American and Europe and how the people those documentaries were aimed at have our own backyards to get in order and our own wild species to find ways to live alongside.
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@Quokkat7 From YouTube ↗ 12 Jul 2026 8
This pulled me in so fast, Michelle is a fantastic host, I hope they can make more videos.
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I didn't know I wanted a documentary about wild cows, but here we are and I'm thrilled 😅
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What a treat! Such a great episode, and an awesome host! 🎉
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I'm thrilled to see these longer form videos in addition to the short ones.
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@EmiliaDale From YouTube ↗ 11 Jul 2026 33
"Horses are a whole situation" lmao so true bestie
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@AFTAF1235 From YouTube ↗ 11 Jul 2026 74
This was a heck of a collaboration and a nice long form SciShow and Eons show. It honestly felt like a normal show for both channels. The guests were amazing as well as the animators. And Michelle, I was thinking about the wolves in Yellowstone and still remember when they first got introduced. Awesome work to everyone involved in this.
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Onions are apparently extinct in the wild too. That is the specific species. There are 100s of wild Allium species, many of which are colloquially called "wild onions", but the one that gave us the world's most important vegetable isn't among them.
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Such a great piece! Thank you Eons and SciShow! Will show this to my science classes next school year.
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Long form videos! EONS and SciShow Colab! MORE please!! this was awesome!
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@joeleoleo From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 106
Julius Caesar would have been familiar with the now extinct North African elephant, the same species used by Hannibal, which was smaller than the still living African Elephant species, and even slightly smaller than its Indian Cousins.
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I’m no fan of extinction but I’m glad we can use our specially evolved petting appendages to give their descendants a scritch without getting trampled and disemboweled
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@Glitch3898 From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 254
A collab and its 48 min long? amazing.
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@WeideVanEnt From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 285
Ceasar was correct about the size of them compared to an elephant; in their days there were more elephant species around, and those most known to Ceasar were quite a bit smaller than the African elephants we know today. There are still tiny elephant species in Asia.
Also, in Dutch the aurochs are called: oeros.
Oer = prefix used, meaning ancient, primal.
Os = oxen
I tried to think up how to type the word phonetically for English speakers but I'm a bit at a loss tbh. I'll try add later. 😄
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@adpirtle From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 136
So that's why all those ancient cow horn sculptures are shaped like that...
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@DaddySlater From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 165
I was a meat manager/meat cutter for 10 years and when I used to do that I would always think about how the knowledge of butchering animals has basically been passed down person to person to everyone who knows how to cut meat since basically as long as we have been eating meat but point being if you go back far enough in the chain of butchers who taught someone younger how to cut eventually the person that taught someone to cut meat that is responsible for that knowledge being in my brain right now learned their craft on these animals. I often wonder how different too would the proportion of the muscle cuts be to each other prior to it being bred to produce meat compared to today.
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wasn't expecting wild cows to have such a cinematic backstory
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@nebulan From YouTube ↗ 10 Jul 2026 1600
I totally didn't mentally process that Michelle wasn't a normal host until they reminded me that this isn't Eons
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Caesar would have been familiar with the now extinct North African Elephant, which was considerably smaller than the extant African Bush Elephant.
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YouTube gives me answers to questions I never thought to ask, but yet am happy to have the answer to