Selective breeding, Robert Bakewell, the herd book, artificial insemination and genomics.
Herders always kept the animals they liked best and ate the rest. Over generations that choice changed coat color, size, temperament and fleece. Darwin opened On the Origin of Species (1859) with breeders' pigeons, sheep and cattle as his evidence that selection could change a species.
The bridge from the farm to the theory of evolution.
At Dishley in Leicestershire, Robert Bakewell bred close relatives to fix the traits he wanted, kept careful records and rented out his best rams. His New Leicester sheep and Longhorn cattle grew fat fast for the meat markets of industrial towns. He is often called the father of modern animal breeding.
Records plus selection: the method still used today.
In 1822 George Coates published the first herd book, for Shorthorn cattle, listing each animal's parents. Herd and flock books turned a breed into a closed, recorded population, and the pedigree became a price tag. Breed associations still keep these registries.
A breed is a list of ancestors as much as a look.
The Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani made the first artificial insemination of a dog in the 1780s. In 1949 Christopher Polge and colleagues found that glycerol let semen survive freezing, and by the 1950s dairy farmers could use one bull's genes across thousands of cows.
One animal can now father a whole national herd.
Dolly the sheep, cloned at Scotland's Roslin Institute, was born in 1996. Since about 2009, dairy breeders have chosen bulls by reading their DNA instead of waiting years for their daughters' milk records. The gain is speed; the risk is a shrinking gene pool, which is why rare breeds matter.
Why the heritage breeds in this museum are a seed bank.