90 CONSERVATION OF CANADIAN WILD LIFE 
ada and Greenland can be separated into three well-defined 
types, and that in the absence of further evidence the musk- 
oxen of the continental Barren Grounds are referable to the 
one species, Ovibos moschatus moschatus. Like the buffalo, 
its head, throat, and shoulders are covered with long hair 
arising through a thick coat of under fur, but in the musk-ox 
this long hair covers the greater part of the body, and 
serves to protect the animal from snow, while the thick 
covering of under fur is essential to an animal which lives 
in some of the coldest and most inhospitable regions of the 
world. The valuable character of its fur has been one of 
the main causes of its great decrease in numbers, as musk- 
ox robes have always been in great demand by fur traders. 
Formerly it was widely distributed in the arctic regions 
of northern Europe and Asia as well as North America, 
and remains of musk-ox have been found in fairly recent 
geological deposits (Pleistocene) in Siberia, Russia, Ger- 
many, Austria, France, and England, with the remains of 
the mammoth, reindeer, and woolly rhinoceros. It is now 
entirely confined to northern Canada, some of the islands 
of the Arctic, and Greenland. It is, as its appearance so 
strongly suggests, a descendant of those prehistoric animals 
that ranged the regions of ice, snow, and rock that in former 
times spread over the land areas of the northern hemi- 
sphere. Within historic times the musk-ox ranged over 
the whole of the Barren Grounds from Alaska and the mouth 
of the Mackenzie River on the west to the Churchill River 
on the east, but to-day the region it occupies is very restricted 
compared with its former distribution, as will be shown later. 
Habits——In these regions the musk-ox, which does not 
migrate in the manner shown by the barren-ground caribou, 
by reason of its abundant coat of thick hair withstands the 
blizzards and the deep snows, and, with the aid of the furi- 
ous gales which sweep across those wastes, it is able to 
eke out an existence on the dried grasses and creeping wil- 
