"Of Aurochs and Angels... the Refuge of Art."

The new Court 13 project "BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD" is a tale of many things: fathers and daughters, drunks and cowards, pirated ferry boats, hallowed half-time shows, ramen noodles and gator grits. But on a certain, larger scale, it's also about the beginning of the End. And the agent of the apocalypse in this case is none other than a fearsome, beastly creature called an Aurochs.

Long extinct, the aurochs has thawed from its icy grave thanks to the global thermometer's steady climb, to rise again and wreak havoc on Canada... and then our young protagonist's beloved Southern environs.

Sound far-fetched? The stuff of mere fantasy? I present the following video, from National Geographic. Undead woolly mammals: coming soon to a tundra, or cinema, near you.



You can get the skinny on the whole discovery here, at the National Geographic page: photos, the mammoth lab, and a piece on mammoth cloning.

The real aurochs actually have a well carved out place in cultural history, recorded by everyone from the cavemen at Lascaux to Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, we'll leave with a quote about them from Julius Caesar, describing their ferocity in "Gallic Wars":

"These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this sort of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed."