Rostral Grand Sheep
Rostral grand sheep (known coloquially as Rostral grands or island bighorns) are a species of sheep endemic to the territory of the Ovinex Island Tribes in the Rostral Tesseract.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Anatomically, Rostral grands are nearly indistinguishable from their mainland counterparts with one exception: Rostral grands are notably robust and have broader shoulders. While the Ovinex are believed to have diminished in stature as a manifestation of island dwarfism, Rostral grands exhibit island gigantism.
Genetics and Reproduction
Rostral grands are capable of interbreeding with their mainland counterparts, though this almost never happens in practice due to isolation and, more recently, a desire to retrain their gigantism through selective breeding.
Additional Information
Domestication
The Native Ovinex people keep domesticated Rostral grands for a variety of purposes. While domestication of a close partner species (i.e. human domestication of primates) would be considered taboo most everywhere else in the Manifold, Ovinex appear to have no qualms about the matter.
In addition to their use in the production of various animal products, Rostral grands are capable as serving as dray creatures, pack animals, and even mounts. As mounts, Rostral grands are appealing because they retain the leaping and climbing acumen of their mainland counterparts despite their prodigious size. A few Rostral grand herds have been exported to the Rostran Archipelago Confederacy explicitly to serve as war mounts. Even in the dieseltech age, units of Civil Ovinex cavalry mounted on Rostral grand occasionally see service in scouting and fast attack roles. In particularly mountainous terrain, Rostral grands have superior maneuverability and field endurance to even auto-armor, as grass and drinking water are far more common than diesel fuel in such regions.
Uses, Products & Exploitation
Though each fully-grown animal represents a prodigious amount of mutton, the Native Ovinex never slaughter a healthy specimen and do not eat the meat of sickly specimens, leaving only the elderly and irreparably injured animals as sources of meat. Instead, Rostral grands are prized by their Ovinex handlers for the prodigious amount of milk, lanolin, and wool they produce, with the latter two products representing the overwhelming bulk of the Native Ovinex Tribes' exports to other powers (especially the Rostran Archipelago Confederacy)
Scientific Name
Ovis aries major
Geographic Distribution
Related Ethnicities
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