TAMARAW TAXONOMY AND SYSTEMATIC
KINGDOM ANIMALIA: Animals collectively
PHYLUM CHORDATA: Animals with backbone (in the vertebrates) or the rudiments of a backbone, the chorda. CLASS MAMMALIA: Mammals or warm bloodied, hairy animals that produce their young alive and suckle them for a period of time on a secretion from the mammary glands. FAMILY Bovidae: Ruminants having polycotyledonary placenta, hollow non-deciduous unbranched horns, and nearly universal presence of a gall bladder. TRIBE Bovini: includes the largest living members of the Bovidae of the genera Bos, Bison, Syncerus and Bubalus: characterized by low and wide skulls, frontals and horn cores with internal sinuses, a short braincase and widened occipital, molars with large basal pillars and complicated central cavities and molars with prominent ribs between the styles. GENUS Bubalus: The genus Bubalus is characterized most clearly by skull morphology; horn cores with angular cross section and inner keels, relatively little elongation of the thoracic neural spine, broad hooves, a stout rounded shape to the body and the headward direction of the hair along the midline of the neck. SPECIES Bubalus mindorensis (Huede, 1988)
Synonyms: Anoa mindorensis (Steere, 1888); Bubalus arnee mindorensis
(Bohlkenm 1958)
Steere (1888) placed tamaraw in the genus Anoa and until quite recently his opinion was widely accepted. Groves (1969) recommended making Anoa a subgenus of Bubalus and he did not consider that Tamaraw belonged to this subgenus but advocated the its inclusion in subgenus Bubalus on the basis of horn morphology, relative limb length, skull structure and dental characters. Bohlken (1958) treated tamaraws as a subspecies of the water buffalo, Bubalus arnee mindorensis, but Groves argued that they deserved specific rank based on morphological grounds (much smaller in size, more robust build, short thick horns; shortened and thickened distal segments of the limbs. Since Hooper (1941) has shown that Heudeโs description of the tamaraw has priority over that of Steere, the species should be known as Bubalus mindorensis (Huede, 1988). The specific rank of the tamaraw is now widely accepted.
