The muskox Ovibos moschatus [ a ] [ b ] is a hoofed mammal of the family Bovidae. This musky odor has the effect of attracting females during mating season.
Its Inuktitut name "umingmak" translates to "the bearded one". The muskox is in the subtribe Ovibovina or tribe Ovibovini in the tribe Caprini or subfamily Caprinae of the subfamily Antilopinae in the family Bovidae. It is therefore more closely related to sheep and goats than to oxen ; it is placed in its own genus, Ovibos Latin : "sheep-ox". It is one of the two largest extant members of the caprines, along with the similarly sized Takin Budorcas. Instead, the muskox's closest living relatives appear to be the gorals of the genus Naemorhedus , nowadays common in many countries of central and east Asia.
The vague similarity between takin and muskox is therefore an example of convergent evolution. The modern muskox is the last member of a line of ovibovines that first evolved in temperate regions of Asia and adapted to a cold tundra environment late in its evolutionary history. Muskox ancestors with sheep-like high-positioned horns horn cores being mostly over the plane of the frontal bones , rather than below them as in modern muskoxen first left the temperate forests for the developing grasslands of Central Asia during the Pliocene , expanding into Siberia and the rest of northern Eurasia.
Later migration waves of Asian ungulates that included high-horned muskoxen reached Europe and North America during the first half of the Pleistocene. The first well known muskox, the "shrub-ox" Euceratherium , crossed to North America over an early version of the Bering Land Bridge two million years ago and prospered in the American southwest and Mexico. Euceratherium was larger yet more lightly built than modern muskoxen, resembling a giant sheep with massive horns, and preferred hilly grasslands.
A genus with intermediate horns, Soergelia , inhabited Eurasia in the early Pleistocene, from Spain to Siberia, and crossed to North America during the Irvingtonian 1. Unlike Euceratherium , which survived in America until the Pleistocene- Holocene extinction event , Soergelia was a lowland dweller which disappeared fairly early, displaced by more advanced ungulates, such as the "giant muskox" Praeovibos literally "before Ovibos ".
