Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. In the Iberian Peninsula the fossil record of artiodactyls spans over 53 million years. During the Pleistocene, wild cattle species such as Bison and especially Bos became common.
In Late Pleistocene, the aurochs Bos primigenius was widespread and the only bovine living along the large river valleys of southern Iberia. Although commonly found in fossil sites and especially in cave bone assemblages, the trace fossil record of aurochs was known worldwide only from the Holocene. The large bovine tracks are formally described as Bovinichnus uripeda igen.
The artiodactyls are even-toed ungulates belonging to a diversified group of large land mammals that can be found nowadays all over the world, except Antarctica. The oldest fossils of even-toed ungulates date back to the early Eocene and were found in Europe, Asia and North America 1.
The oldest bone remains known in Europe were found in the Iberian Peninsula and are dated from this period 2 , 3. However, their record of living activities, known through the study of trace fossils, such as tracks or excrements, is much more scattered, and known only since the late Eocene to early Oligocene in North America and Europe, including Spain 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 see the recent attribution of late Paleocene tracks to possible basal artiodactyls or tapiroids 8.
Fossil tracks, when safely attributed to a specific producer, can be complementary to the osteological record, providing additional data on geographical distribution of species, their paleoecology and biological behaviour. The body fossil record of the bovine tribe is relatively common in Quaternary deposits, but rarely have tracks been attributed to these animals.
