American Buffalo by Steven Rinella Read Free Book Online

thousand years ago. Dale Guthrie, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, cooked and ate part of the animal’s neck. He reported it to be “well aged but still a little tough.”
    While reading about old buffalo skulls, I encountered a lot of arguments and speculations about the various species and subspecies of buffalo that lived in North America at one time or another. This was initially very confusing to me, and since then I’ve found that it’s confusing to other people as well. First off, it’s important to be clear that there is no difference between the American buffalo and the American bison. The word “buffalo” likely originated in a roundabout way involving the English. In Shakespeare’s time, military men often wore a type of protective jacket known as a buff coat; these coats were thick and soft and made of undyed leather. When Englishmen arrived in the New World, they would often describe any animal that yielded such leather as a “buff,” be it a moose or a manatee. Eventually all of the other North American animals acquired their own particular names, and the largest of them, the American buffalo, walked away with exclusive rights to the title. The name bounced around a bit—buffs, bufle, buffle, buffelo, buffaloe—but it had begun to settle into its modern form by the time of the American Revolution.
    The problem with the word “buffalo” is that it had already been given away a couple of times earlier, once to the water buffalo of Asia and once to the Cape buffalo of Africa. Taxonomists, the people in the business of naming and classifying organisms, saw this as a problem, particularly because the American buffalo is not closely related to either of those creatures. As a solution, they began promoting the word “bison,” which had already been used in the Latin name of a closely related European animal, the wisent (
Bison bonasus
). It seems as though these efforts to clarify the situation were in vain: we’ve now got an animal with two perfectly serviceable names, and many discussions about the animal inevitably begin with the question, “What’s the difference between buffalo and bison?”
    The scientific system for classifying organisms, whereby an animal gets two names, such as
Bison bison,
is known as binomial nomenclature. Under this system, the first word is the generic name, or genus. The second word is the specific name, or species. Carl Linnaeus, who invented binomial nomenclature, was born in 1707 and believed that all of the world’s species were distinct creatures independently created by the hand of God; more simply put, he didn’t know about evolution. This excusable bit of oversight, considering his time period, makes his system less than ideal for naming fossils.

    Bison latifrons
skull recovered in North Dakota.
    Here’s why: Over the years, archaeologists and paleontologists (and guys like me) have unearthed many buffalo skulls that look a lot different from the skulls of modern buffalo. For instance, a full-grown modern buffalo has a horn span, from tip to tip, of about three feet. Some ancient buffalo skulls, however, have a horn span of seven feet. And while the modern buffalo’s horns sweep upward and backward, these seven-footers were mostly straight with slight forward-facing curves toward the tips. Other skulls fall in between the two extremes, and each has its own idiosyncratic shape and horn configuration. Logically, taxonomists gave these skulls different names. The really big ones became
Bison latifrons
; other, smaller types of skulls picked up their own names, including
Bison priscus
,
Bison athabascae
,
Bison alleni
,
Bison antiquus
, and
Bison occidentalis
. For much of the twentieth century, the relationships between these different buffalo were not very well understood. Scientists believed that at least some of them coexisted in the present-day United States, where they interbred to produce the modern buffalo. We now know that this is not