{"id":106,"date":"2018-03-28T19:59:38","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T19:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/?p=106"},"modified":"2018-11-14T21:05:45","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T21:05:45","slug":"bison-arrival-to-north-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/2018\/03\/28\/bison-arrival-to-north-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Bison arrival to North America"},"content":{"rendered":"
Fig. 2.\u00a0<\/span>Reconstructions of bison skulls based on fossils attributed to (A<\/em>) a giant long-horned bison,\u00a0B. latifrons<\/em>; (B<\/em>) a Late Pleistocene steppe bison,\u00a0B. priscus<\/em>; and (C<\/em>) a present-day\u00a0B. bison<\/em>. Giant long-horned bison were significantly larger than present-day bison; adult males may have weighed in excess of 2,000 kg, which is twice as large as present-day bison, and had horns that spanned as much as 2.2 m (57<\/a>,\u00a058<\/a>).<\/h6>\n

This spring we published a paper that was a little more than a decade in the making.\u00a0 We have recovered, over the years, bison fossils from a lot of localities in the Yukon and Alaska, but just what is the earliest bison record?\u00a0 Well the literature is pretty muddled on the topic and based on our work over the last 15 or so years, we were pretty convinced that they don’t go beyond MIS 6.\u00a0 We were able to confirm that from some excavations we did along the Old Crow River at a site called CRH12 (after C. Richard Harington, UofA alumnus and Quaternary vertebrate curator-extraordinaire (though now retired) from the Canadian Museum of Nature) that despite a very rich fauna \u2013 there were no bison.\u00a0 This is consistent with our work in central Yukon, interior Alaska etc.\u00a0 We never find bison younger than latest MIS 6 (or more commonly) in last interglacial (MIS 5) and later deposits.\u00a0 We joined up with my frequent collaborator Beth Shapiro at UCSC to get ancient DNA from some of these early fossils, including the earliest one that we could constrain very tightly to late MIS 6 from the Old Crow area along the Porcupine River.\u00a0 That fossil, not surprisingly sat basal in the tree from all other North American bison, indicating that this was indeed the earliest North American bison and sat quite close in the tree to a\u00a0Bison latifrons\u00a0<\/em>fossil from Colorado that dated to the last interglacial.<\/p>\n

This is where it gets interesting.\u00a0 B. latifrons<\/em> is the giant horned bison with the 2 m+ horn span that is generally regarded as the ‘first’ bison in the continental U.S., but has never been found in Alaska or Yukon, where presumably they should since bison only arrived from Asia in the late-Middle Pleistocene (as we establish).\u00a0 This means that\u00a0B. latifrons<\/em> must have evolved from our northern steppe bison (Bison priscus<\/em>) after it arrived in the south.\u00a0 Up until this paper was published, despite so much work that has been done on bison,\u00a0B. latifrons<\/em> DNA has never been sequenced.\u00a0 So in short, we put a very nice chronology to the arrival of North American bison, which just happens to coincide with the start of the Rancholabrean North American Land Mammal Age, and showed that the steppe bison that first colonized North America (B. priscus<\/em>) quickly morphed into the giant horned bison,\u00a0B. latifrons<\/em> very quickly.\u00a0 Much of this was speculated on by R. Dale Guthrie more than 40 years ago, but it’s nice when the science aligns to support it.\u00a0 The paper was published in\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fig. 2.\u00a0Reconstructions of bison skulls based on fossils attributed to (A) a giant long-horned bison,\u00a0B. latifrons; (B) a Late Pleistocene steppe bison,\u00a0B. priscus; and (C) a present-day\u00a0B. bison. Giant long-horned bison were significantly larger than present-day bison; adult males may have weighed in excess of 2,000 kg, which is twice as large as present-day bison, … Continue reading “Bison arrival to North America”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.eas.ualberta.ca\/froeselab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}