At the first sign of their only typical predator, the arctic wolf, muskoxen will release a powerful scent from glands just below the eye, which seems to change the animals' demeanor from normal docility into aggressive and agile defenders. Forming a protective square around the women and children, the males charge the intruders, goring and trampling with their long, sharp horns, and powerful hooves. If a wolf manages to grab one, he will buck and leap in the air, attempting to crush the attacker by coming down on it with their huge sides.
When massive sheets of ice came down from the north 20, 000 years ago, burying Canada all the way down to St. Louis, Missouri, musk ox ranged as far south as Kansas and Virginia, grazing the plains ahead of the glacier fronts along with mammoths and reindeer. Eventually the glaciers melted back, leaving the the landscape littered with lakes while glaciers in the western Mountain ranges shrank into the heights, with forest taking their place.
Northern Ice Sheet, Hannes Grobe.
The mastodons and mammoths disappeared along with the glaciers, but musk ox, along with rabbits, foxes, polar bears, wolves and caribou survived the changing climate by following the retreating ice sheet north to their present ranges. Along with bison and pronghorn, muskox are among the few Pleistocene megafauna species to survive the Pleistocene/Holocene extinction into present day North America.
