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 hves 

 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- 



