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Hi everyone and welcome to Curious By Nature.
My name is Dawn and I take care of all the collections here at the Nature Museum.
Today, we're going to learn more about the American bison because this Saturday,
November 7th, is National Bison Day.
Let's take a look at some of the bison specimens in our collection.
This mounted specimen of an American bison can be seen in the Wilderness Walk exhibit at the Nature Museum.
This bison stands in a diorama depicting a prairie habitat which used to cover most of Illinois.
Bison were extirpated from Illinois by the 1820s and by the start of the 20th century
were down to only a few hundred individuals left in North America.
Conservation programs have brought this species back from the brink of extinction.
You can see bison and habitats like this in Illinois now.
They have been reintroduced at several locations in Illinois, including the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie and Nachusa Grasslands.
Here we have a full-size mounted bison specimen.
This is a plains bison and they're characterized by the short horns here and this nice rounded hump.
There is another species of bison in North America that's called the wood bison and it has a much more angular hump than the plains bison does.
This individual actually has his winter coat.
You can see he's got really woolly fur all around, but he's been fairly manicured so he looks his best for exhibits.
Now this guy stands, from the base of his hooves up to the very tip of his hump, is six feet tall, so he's really a big individual.
In life, male bison run about 2,000 pounds.
Now, surprisingly, this is really interesting,
even though they are such large and heavy animals, bison can jump, believe it or not, up to about six or seven feet.
So any kind of enclosures that they have for private ranches and things like that or
even out at Nachusa Grasslands or Midewin, they have very tall fences that surround those areas.
Here we have an American bison skull on exhibit inside the Nature Museum.
This specimen allows us to observe some of the bison skeletal structure, helping us understand more about it.
Bison skulls are pretty thick, as the males will fight for females by clashing their horns and bodies together.
Both male and female bison grow horns.
Horns consist of two parts.
There's the inner bony protrusion that's actually a part of the animal skull and the outer part,
or the sheath, is made of a tough protein called keratin.
It's actually the same stuff that makes up hair, feathers, nails, and hooves.
You might notice the horns look a little fibrous, like wood.
That texture is actually caused by that fibrous protein.
Standing in front of the Academy's Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is a beautiful artistic rendition of an American bison.
The artist, Chris Williams, created this sculpture out of pieces of steel welded together.
You can see on the hind end of the bison, the pieces fit closely next to each other, like puzzle pieces,
to make the smoother parts of its body, and on the bison's head and shoulders he overlaid the
pieces or positioned them at angles to give the appearance of texture for those more woolly parts.
The piece was donated to the Museum's collection by the Handwerker family.
In this exhibit, the sculpture stands amongst a restored prairie much like bison would have when
they roamed freely across the Illinois prairie.
So that's our tour of the collections today.
Thank you so much for watching.
The American bison is truly a majestic animal.
I hope you get to enjoy some of the activities around the Chicago region for the Bison Crawl and National Bison Day.
Be sure to leave any questions you have for us in the comments below
and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
We'll see you here next time on Curious By Nature.