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Musk Ox — printable fact sheet
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Musk Ox
Ovibos moschatus
Ovibos moschatus is not an ox and does not produce musk in the sense a musk deer does; it is a goat-antelope relative in the subfamily Caprinae, closer to sheep and goats than to cattle, and the strong smell comes from urine that bulls spray on their belly fur during the rut. It…
Did you know?
- The qiviut wool shed by musk oxen in spring is eight times warmer than sheep’s wool and is highly prized for making luxury garments.
- Musk oxen survived the end-Pleistocene extinctions that killed the mammoth and woolly rhino, and they once shared the mammoth steppe with both. A single adult sheds roughly 2 to 3 kg of qiviut a year, and Alaskan cooperatives have built a knitting industry on wool combed from farmed animals rather than shorn. Their Inuktitut name, umingmak, means "the bearded one," referring to the skirt of guard hair that hangs almost to the hooves.
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