348 BRITISH MAMMALS 



Sub-Family : CAPRIN.^. THE SHEEP AND GOATS 



The Sheep and Goats are evidently closely allied ; indeed, it is 

 said that they will interbreed and can produce hybrids. Their 

 horns, especially in the female and young, show those annulations 

 which are so characteristic of the True Antelopes, and which are 

 found in a less marked type in the capricorns. From this 

 last-named stock it is almost certain that the sheep and goats 

 arose, the capricorns having somewhat more archaic features in 

 the anatomy of their soft parts and their bones. Although the 

 sheep have departed somewhat widely from the antelopes or 

 capricorns in the development and directions of their horns, 

 they present primitive features in some directions, and it is more 

 probable that they originated simultaneously with and inde- 

 pendently of the goats from Capricorn ancestors — from some 

 type very like the tahr of India and Arabia [Hemitragus). The 

 tahrs date back in a fossil state to the Pliocene Epoch. Two 

 of the existing forms retain the more primitive four teats in the 

 female. The tahrs, however, in common with all the goats and all 

 but two species of sheep, have very short tails. The length of the 

 tail is a problem, both in the origin of the sheep in general and 

 of the domestic sheep in particular. The domestic sheep (unless 

 interfered with by man) has in all its varieties, woolly and hairy, 

 a long tail, which is supported by a considerable number of 

 caudal vertebras. The same feature exists in another sheep, the 

 audad {Ovis lervid) of North Africa, a form once found in 

 France and Spain. It is impossible, however, to derive the 

 domestic sheep from the audad for many good reasons. Curiously 

 enough, the audad is rather capricorn-like in a number of points, 

 and (in the author's opinion) offers marked affinities to the tahr. 

 The fact of its retaining a long tail, therefore, seems to point to 

 the disappearance of this feature in the tahrs as having been 

 a matter of recent specialisation, and as though the original sheep 

 ' had possessed this appendage, which has persisted in the least 

 specialised torm of sheep (the audad) and in one of the several 

 wild species from which the domestic sheep was derived. One 



