Hi! I saw your post about the tiefling and wanted to ask: is a shofar from a dragon or an extinct animal, like a ram's ancestor, kosher?
Starting with the easier one -the ancient proto-sheep. But first, I would like to note that I am neither a biologist nor a rabbi, and while I have consulted (albeit minimally) with both for the making of this post, I am not the best source. I can provide links to some useful reading, but tumblr being tumblr, with the link-eating that that entails, I will not be putting the links in the post itself.
This is the family tree map of the suborder Ruminantia.
As previously established, sheep are valid sources for a shofar. So too are goats and ibices (if I'm going to pretend to be scholarly, I'm going to use the technically-correct Latin plural) -the mishna even specifically addresses ibex horn as a possible source. Thus if our proto-sheep is still within tribe Caprinae, it is a valid source for a shofar.
What I did not address on the other post is that kudu (and gazelles, oryxes, etc) are also acceptable source animals for shofars. Antelopes, like bovines and caprines, have horns, rather than antlers. The requirement for the shofar is that it be a horn, not a bone -that the bone be covered with a keratin sheath. We can thus move further backwards, and authorize any ancestor still within sub-family Antilopinae.
And here is where we need to take a step out of modern science. The laws of kashrut predate genomics, and are often more rooted in morphology than phylogeny. A whale is not an unkosher animal, it is an unkosher fish, because it is fully aquatic. A bat is not an unkosher animal, it is an unkosher bird, because it is a warm-blooded flying creature.
Halachically speaking, if it looks like a cow and acts like a cow, and has the general criteria we associate with a cow, it's a cow. And cows are not acceptable source animals for shofars.
So if we move further back and reach a common ancestor in the family Bovidae, whether it's an acceptable source for a shofar depends on how cow-shaped it is. An aurochs, for instance, is a cow. While I was unable to find any sort of artistic rendering of the presumed last common ancestor at the divergence of Bovinae and Antilopinae, the earliest bovid I could find was Eotragus sansaniensis, which definitely seems closer in shape to an antelope than a cow. It is thus theoretically possible that an ancestral species in Bovidae might be permissible, with more cow-shaped bovines being specifically set aside from the rest of their family -in much the same way that we colloquially apply the term "reptile" to all non-bird modern diapsids. If that is the case, we would then move backward to the last common ancestor of bovines and cervines in suborder Ruminantia. (We might then be able to move forward along the deer tree until antlers diverge from horns, but that is not an ancient sheep, it's an ancient deer.)
We've got our rules on animals. Now we look at the shofar itself. Optimally, the shofar is curved, rather than straight. A straight shofar meets the technical requirements, but if you want to be as stringent as possible, a curved shofar is better. (That said, eland and gemsbok shofars are incredibly striking.) Per the mishna, even ibex horns are considered too straight to count as curved for this particular discussion -and ibices are specifically discussed as an acceptable source. (We used to use shofars for more purposes than we do today. There was a discussion about when to use the straight one vs the curly.)
Now, given that the shofar-making process usually involves some degree of straightening it in order to hollow out the mouthpiece, there is room for debate here. There are those communities and individuals who prefer striking or resonant shofars, and thus accept the larger ones obtained from various antelopes. There are also those communities that ban even a minimal amount of straightening of a ram's horn. Once we're arguing specific stringencies with common precedent for the lenient opinion, though, I think we can say we're in the clear for permissibility.
However. The previous post mentioned the issues with lacquering and otherwise decorating a shofar, which gets into another concern. Namely, the horn being used cannot possess any cracks or breaks from the end of the mouthpiece until one is past the minimum required length for a shofar.
And, unfortunately, old bones that have been around for millennia tend to have some wear and nicks on them, often of the sort that would invalidate a shofar for use.
So in conclusion, one can use the horn of any proto-sheep still within Ruminantia, unless they were too cow-shaped before diverging within Bovidae, in which case, one can use the horn of any proto-sheep within Antilopinae. But it must have either been phenomenally well-preserved, or the proto-sheep must have lived close enough to contemporaneously with the maker of the shofar that the horn has not sustained damage in the interim -ie, this must be a story involving time travel, cloning, or some sort of alternate history situation.
This is long enough already, so I will reblog with my thoughts on dragons in a separate post.
