(03-12-2024, 08:08 PM)BIAD Wrote: Thanks Ninurta, that was extremely interesting.
But 'Wood Bison'...? I'd never heard of them before.
Back in the day, there were two varieties of bison in what would later become the United States. Everyone now is familiar with the Plains Bison, which is making a comeback now from near extermination, but not many have ever heard of the "Woods Bison" or "Woodland Bison". They were exterminated in the eastern United States long, long ago, the last one being recorded as killed in 1820 in what would later become West Virginia. I'm told that a few still exist in Canada, and I saw two specimens alive and well at the Natural Science Center in Greensboro, NC many years ago.
The Woods Bison lived in the forests of Eastern North America, east of the Mississippi River. They never roamed the plains like their western brethren, but kept to the forests and tallgrass prairies east of the Mississippi. They were somewhat larger than their Plains brethren, paradoxically. You'd think having to navigate the underbrush would lead to a smaller critter, but that was not the case. Other than the slightly larger size, they mimicked their Plain brethren in about every visual particular.
They were also endemic in the canebrakes (thickets of river cane along waterways) in Kentucky, and in the forests eastward of Kentucky, in what would later become the states of the eastern seaboard. I have the records of Lord Dunmore's War, 1774, and in them are listed the sale of buffalo hides taken from Kentucky by Daniel Boone, which he sold to the militia at Russell's Fort in Castle's Woods, what is now Castlewood in Russell County, VA - so there were enough of them still at that time that a man could make a living killing them and selling the hides to the Army, which were then used as blankets and for the production of leather and leather products.
Now they are all gone... except, apparently, for a small herd still living in Canada.
I think both varieties probably originated from the ice age bison, bison antiquus, which was an even huger beast with much larger and longer horns that went extinct at the end of the last ice age, along with mammoths and saber tooth cats and dire wolves and the liek megafauna.
Wikipedia article on Wood Bison. The article mentions their original range, but neglects to mention the entire eastern woodlands of what would become the United States... however, they were here, too, as demonstrated by Long Hunters hunting them, like Daniel Boone, and eye-witness accounts from earlier colonial days, long before whites ever made it into even the Appalachians, much less the western plains where the Plains Bison lived. I've got an old illustration here somewhere from the 1600's that shows some of the fauna encountered, among which are "tygers" - probably eastern jaguars that once lived here as the illustrated critter is spotted, not smooth like a cougar nor striped like a true tiger, and a Wood Bison labelled as a "buffaloe".
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