BISON (Lat.. Gk. gives, bison, wild ox; cf. OHG. Wisunt, Wisant, Ger. Wiscat, bison, AS. Wesend, wild ox). A kind of wild cattle, char acterized by massive and shaggy fore quarters. The name was applied by Pliny and subse quent Latin writers to a wild ox of Europe otherwise called bonasus, and probably the aurochs. More recently the term has been prop erly extended to the American 'buffaloes,' and erroneously to the East Indian gaurs. Zoologi cally, the word is the name of a bovine genus, including the aurochs (Bison bottoms), the American bison (Bison Amerieanns), and several extinct species of both continents.
Bisons differ from other oxen in the excessive development of their fore quarters, where the line of the back arches over the withers in a hump formed by the long dorsal spines that give at tachment to the very thick and strong muscles needed to support the massive head: also in their more slender limb-bones and ribs (which number 14 instead of 13), in the breadth and convexity of the front of the skull, where the horns spring from below the top line of the forehead, and in their six, instead of four, nasal hones. "Ex ternally, they differ in having the head heavily clothed with long, bushy hair; they also possess a heavy barb, and the fore legs are heavily fringed with coarse, long hair. The clothing hair of the body also differs from that of repre sentatives of the restricted genus Bos and most of its allies in consisting mainly of short, curled, crisp wool in place of straight hairs. . . . Their nearest ally is probably the yak." (Alen.) The females are smaller. less massive and shaggy in the fore quarters than the hulls, and with lighter horns. The two existing species will be treated of below. Three fossil species are recog nized by J. A. Allen in his classic monograph, The American Bisons (Cambridge. 1S76). One is Bison priscus, a very large, long-horned spe cies, widely distributed in the Pleistoeene forma tions of Europe. Another, named Bison antiquus, is found fossil in northern America. and is so
closely similar that Allen thinks the two might have been local races of a then circumpolar spe cies. Both of these are regarded by some natural ists as direct ancestors of the modern forms. The third is Bison latifrons, a more ancient type (yet belonging to the era preceding the present), which was of gigantic size, with horns that must have spread ten or twelve feet—three to four times that of any other species.
Tile AUROCHB, bonasus, or zubr, has the gen eral form of this type. and an old male stands about six feet high. The color is brown, much darker in the long hair of the fore parts than in the short wool of the sides and flanks. The horns are about 18 inches long, tapering, spread ing. and a little curved inward at the point, and the tail is long and heavily tufted. (free widely distributed over Continental Europe and Trans Caucasia (avoiding the Russian steppes), it would long ago have become extinct were it not that .guarded bands, numbering in 1S98 about TOO individuals, have been protected in the Im perial forest preserves of Bialowieza in Lith uania, while a few hundred more roam semi-wild in the fastnesses of the Caucasus. It has never been really domesticated. though several experi mental crossings have been made between it and tame cattle, the results of which have not been important. It is said to exhibit aversion to association with other cattle, and to retain its ancestral wildness and shyness with great te nacity. It moves about in small bands, which are easily provoked to anger, and become dangerous by the swiftness of their movements and the overpowering force of their weight in a charge. Its food consists of grass and brushwood. and the leaves and bark of yonng trees. Its cry is pe culiar, "resembling a groan or grunt more than the lowing of an ox." It does not attain its full stature till after its sixth year, and lives for about thirty or forty years.