The American Bison was an animal that roamed from Alaska to Mexico and from Appalachia to the Sierra Nevada. It was North America’s largest and most ubiquitous land animal.

A historical map shows the ranges affected by the extermination of the American bison over time. Library of Congress. By the late 1860s, the U.S. Army was encouraging this mass slaughter.

The American bison is ecologically extinct. Its population is now too small to fill the role it once played in trimming grasses, "plowing" the ground with its hoofs, fertilizing the soil with ...

The American Bison makes a comeback 01:38 “Well, in Yellowstone National Park, there were less than 25 animals,” Wenk said. “It is one of the greatest wildlife conservation stories in the ...

386696 08: A small buffalo herd graze March 13, 2001 at the Groves bison ranch near Kiowa, Colorado. In the early 1800’s there were between 40 to 60 million bison roaming the North American plains.

Bison origins and sacred places. Indigenous people continued to remember and revere bison in rituals and ceremonies. Every tribe on the Great Plains has its own “deep individual connection to ...

He was also a founding member of the American Bison Society (ABS), established in 1905 with the stated goal of saving the bison from extinction. In 1907, the ABS sent 15 Bronx Zoo bison to the ...

The American bison is an incredibly interesting critter. Sometimes called buffalo, this name is a misnomer and suggests that the American bison is somehow related to the buffalo of the Old World.

Thanks to conservation efforts, the American bison was not lost to extinction. Today, there are around 20,000 wild bison living in protected herds in national and state parks across America.