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Stories:
Ancient Ungulate
Ancient Ungulate
Ancestors of today's bison, similar to the species depicted in the cave painting below, wandered across the then-dry Bering Strait more than 300,000 years ago. Paletontologists have long known that a Pleistocene Era decendant of these earliest buffalo, called Bison antiquus, extended the species' range well into what is now the American Midwest. But fossils documenting that movement can be hard to come by. Skulls are especially scarce.
Luckily, R. Lee Lyman, a professor and chair of MU's Department of Anthropology, has recently bolstered the evidence by identifying a skull found five years ago along the Missouri River near Jefferson City, Mo., as a bona fide 13,000-year-old B. antiquus. "Skulls are pretty rare," Lyman says. "Seventy to 80 percent of what we learn from them is about the past, but the more we learn about the past, the better the decisions we can make about the future. For example, what were the plant communities and climate like when bison lived in Missouri? That is something we need to know if we want bison, perhaps with human help, to live here again."
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