2.6 million years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, the Sabretooth and Willie Mammoth

roamed across the North Pole, and so did another prehistoric creature.

It was this colossal, horned, barrel-shaped, shapidated. a But unlike the saber tooth and the woolly mammoth, this handsome beast is still very much alive.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and

wondrous places.

Today we're taking you to the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer, Alaska. It's where a huge group of muscocks now live pretty comfortably.

In exchange for their room and board, they offer up some of the finest wool in the world. So to start, we should set the record

so to start we should set the record straight.

The name Mus Musk Ox is really misleading.

So Musk Oxen, total misnomer, have no Musk, are not Ox.

That's Mark Austin.

He's the executive director of the Musk ox farm.

It's the nonprofit that these musk ox live at and it's one of the few places in the world

attempting to raise domesticated muscocks.

And the animals got their name because they do look a bit like oxen,

but in reality they're not related to oxen at all.

They're closer to sort of gigantic mountain goats or enormous sheep.

The farm currently has a herd of about 80 muscocks,

which they raise for their fancy wool called Kiviot.

And the process of domesticating

one of the world's few remaining ice age megafauna, this animal that is both very, very big and very, very strong, isn't easy.

You know, for an animal to go from wild to floppy years and spots, hallmarks of domestication could take hundreds and hundreds of years.

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