Man, Dog, and now Cow...PIG next?

Scientists Unravel Genome of Cow
Signs of Human Intervention Seen
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/23/AR2009042303453.html

By David BrownWashington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 24, 2009
The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to modern civilization.
A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries yesterday published the entire DNA message -- the genome -- of an 8-year-old female Hereford living at an experimental farm in Montana.
Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years, and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past 10,000.

"There are two types of cattle -- taurine, which have no humps and predominate in Europe, Africa, the Americas and much of Asia; and indicine, which have humps and are in South Asia and East Africa.

Both lineages descended from aurochs, a much larger and more aggressive species. Indicine breeds have much greater genetic diversity than taurine breeds, evidence that they were developed from a larger number of "founder" animals.

Cows have a large number of genes devoted to big-gun, nonspecific defenses called "innate immunity," probably reflecting the fact that the animals rely on a huge variety of bacteria and other organisms to digest the roughage they eat".

FD: My father broke it down into good cows and crazy cows.