Senior curator tracks bison fossils for clues

Conventional thinking concludes that the near extinction of the bison in North America was the result of indiscriminate hunting by humans, which left only a few hundred bison alive by the end of the 19th century.

Recent research published in the journal Science, however, shows that global climate changes dealt a considerable blow to the bison long before humans became a part of the bison’s decline. Larry D. Martin, senior curator of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Center, was part of a team of 27 scientists who conducted DNA analysis of 442 bison fossils found in Siberia, China and Canada, as well as Alaska and Wyoming, to make the surprising conclusion.

“ Bison have a very low genetic diversity today,” said Martin, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “We were never surprised by this because we knew that huge populations of bison had been killed by human hunting. The shocking thing is that before that happened, Mother Nature nearly took the bison out.”

The study was made possible by studying DNA in the fossils found in the frozen ground in Siberia, China and Alaska, Martin said. Beth Shapiro of Oxford University in England was the lead researcher on the study.

For his part in the study, Martin studied bison fossils from Natural Trap Cave near Lovell, Wyoming. Martin has been extracting fossils from the site since the ’70s.