Bison

Male bison (Bison bonasus ) in Eastern Polish Bialowieza National Park

• American Bison (Bison bison)
• European bison (Bison bonasus )

The bison (Bison ) is a genus in the northern hemisphere widespread wild cattle. Today there are two representatives, the American Bison (Bison bison) and occurring in Europe bison (Bison bonasus ). The Late Latin word bison is probably a borrowing of the Germanic word wisund.

History of development

As a precursor of the Ur - bison is considered an ox of the genus Leptobos. This Eurasian Ur - Bison (Bison sivalensis ) developed on its spread of North India to the west and in the vast steppes of Asia to the steppe bison (Bison priscus ) on. A 35,000 -year-old copy was in 1979 by a gold panners near Fairbanks, Alaska found. It went down in the history of research, called Blue Babe, because the skin due to a chemical reaction with the air turned blue in his recovery.

The steppe bison was hunted by the people of the Cro -Magnon period and recorded in cave drawings, see the cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux and Chauvet, before it became extinct at the end of the last ice age.

Bison emerged originally in Eurasia. The steppe bison crossed during the Ice Age ( the Early to Middle Pleistocene ) the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska (now the Bering Strait ) and settled in the northern parts of North America. For him, two species that conquered the southern parts of the continent in two successive waves of immigration developed. The first was the huge Bison latifrons, who immigrated in the early or middle Pleistocene to America and became extinct in the late Pleistocene, about 20,000 years ago. The second consisted of prehistoric bison forms, however, were already members of today's bison Bison type. Originally langhörnige Bison bison antiquus and the somewhat kurzhörnigere form Bison bison occidentalis were regarded as separate species, but recent studies show that they are subspecies of modern bison ( Bison bison). In the early Holocene, approximately 6000 years ago, developed the present, rather short-horned subspecies of bison, the plains bison Bison bison bison, and the wood bison Bison bison athabascae, and replaced the Pleistocene forms.

Today's American bison and European bison are fully crossable, which suggests a close relationship between the two forms. Analyzes of DNA, however, revealed that bison and American bison were genetically partially differ greatly. While bison and bison in the paternally inherited Y chromosome match strong, there are significant differences in the sequence of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA. Thus, the American Bison with respect to the mitochondrial DNA forms a unit with the yak, bison during the matches herein with the aurochs. A possible explanation would be that prehistoric bison bulls once interbred with relatives of the aurochs or their ancestors, and so produced the ancestors of the European bison. Collectively, these studies suggest that the genera Bos and Bison are paraphyletic and should be thus merged into a single genus Bos.