Bison Antiquus, sometimes called the “Ancient Bison”, was the most common large herbivore of the North American continent for over ten thousand years, and is a direct ancestor of the living American bison.

Bison originated in Eurasia. The bison is one of the few members of the bovine family to have crossed the Bering Strait land bridge in prehistoric times to North America, where now there are only two species to survive in North America: the plains bison and the wood bison. During the Ice Ages, much of the Earth’s sea water froze into glaciers, lowering sea level, and leaving dry land where there was once water. Shallow channels that separated land masses became grassy swales. One such “land bridge,” called Beringia, joined Siberia and Alaska.

Archaeologists theorize that the first people who came to this continent followed herds of horses, woolly mammoths, and ancient bison across this land bridge. When the ice ages ended, water filled in the low areas, again separating land masses. Of the animals that crossed the land bridge, woolly mammoths and horses eventually became extinct. There is a specie, the wisent, in Europe but that unfortunately is almost extinct and primarily survives in parks and zoos.

There were as many as 60 million bison that lived on the Great Plains from Mexico into Canada and some were even found east of the Mississippi River.