Darwin’s Leptobos

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the second edition of Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’, published in 1874, we would like to pay tribute to the great work of Charles Darwin himself, Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major and Ludwig Rütimeyer. These nineteenth-century eminent scientists dealt in different ways with two hornless ‘Bos’ etruscus skulls housed at the ‘Museo di Geologia e Paleontologia’ of the ‘Università degli Studi di Firenze’. In this work, we reappraise for the first time these fossils from both a taxonomic and science history point of views. We confirm their attribution to the extinct bovine Leptobos etruscus, an ungulate well recorded in the European large mammal assemblages during the Early Pleistocene (Villafranchian European Land Mammal Age). These specimens, labelled IGF 599 and IGF 2174, were part of the nineteenth-century scientific debate involving the scientists mentioned above. Darwin in fact cited the ‘Bos’ etruscus skull belonging to the Florentine collection as a further example to explain the differences between the sexes of any species, hypothesising a struggle among males to obtain the females.