The Russian Bison (Bison Priscus)

The immediate ancestor of the modern aurochs and bisons had a huge natural habitat. At the time of Pleistocene the primitive bison was presented by a dozen of various forms: from small short-horned (woodland) bisons to giant long-horned (steppe) bisons. The bisons occupied not only open-area biotopes, but also forests. The remains of bisons in many sites are really numerous, which evidences their importance as one of major targets of human hunt.

The osseous remains of small bisons appeared for the first time in the deposits of the late Pliocene, that is 1,5 million years ago. These animals had a heavy skull and horns branching off aside and upwards. First appearing in the area adjoining the Black Sea Coast, the bisons quickly inhabited the open spaces of Siberia, and in the early Pleistocene reached North America from Asia via Beringia.

In the middle of the Quaternary bisons reached maximum height and weight reaching 2,5 tons. The span of their horns reached nearly two metres. Such animal could not be overcome by any predator, if alone. Huge herds of bisons wandered from British Isles to Kamchatka, from Tibet to Taymyr.

By the end of Pleistocene, bisons began to die out in Eurasia. They became smaller and adapted to dwelling in the forest. This way two isolated populations of woodland bisons (aurochs) formed: flat-land, or Belovezhsk, and mountain-land – Caucasian. Meanwhile steppe bisons continued to live in the open spaces of the Russian Plain, in South Siberia and Pribaikalye.

The primitive tribes in Europe actively hunted these animals and often pictured them on the walls of caves. Many bison bones are found on paleolithic sites of the Russian Plain and Ciscaucasia.

In taiga and in prairies of North America bisons have survived till now, but in the snowbound tundra and dark coniferous taiga of East Europe and Siberia they shared the lot of mammoths and rhinoceroses.

In 1971, in the middle course of river Indigirka, in the area Mylakhchin, 50 kilometres up the stream from settlement Belaya Gora, a hunter A.M. Struchkov found a corpse of ancient bison buried at the bottom of loess-type terrace of edoma relief.

Scientists from Yakutsk guided by P.A. Lazarev washed up the corpse from the permafrost with the help of monoblock pump and transported it to the underground adit of Geocryology Institute under Siberian Division of USSR Academy of Sciences. Later this monolith was delivered to Novosibirsk, the Biology Institute (Fig...).

The forward part of the animal was severely damaged by the ice wedge, but the backward part was in a good condition. The pelage, skin, skeleton and some muscles were in fact intact. The skull was strongly destroyed, but some internal organs, including the gastrointestinal tract with the remains of food, were preserved.

It was found out, by exterior attributes, that the dead animal was a two-year-old female. According to the data of radiocarbon analysis, the age female bison was about 30 thousand years. The colour of her hair proved to be similar to the one of modern woodland bisons.

The vegetation in this part of Abyisk Lowland is rather poor and counts maximum 200 kinds of plants. This is accounted for by severe climate, poorly dissected and boggy relief. Nowadays the mountain pine, wood birch, poplar and chosenia are not met here.

The plants eaten by female bison were well digested, but they most likely belonged to sedges and graminoids. The remains of mosses are quite numerous. The shrubs represent only 6 % of the stomach, and the tree pollen is represented by single grains. The insignificant quantity of sedge fruits found in the fodder substance evidences that the animal died in the middle of summer, before the semination of graminoids. Shortly before the death the bison female was pasturing on the bank of the river or lake, in an excessively waterlogged meadow. Most likely, she got stuck in the bog and was not able to get out.

The comparison of the stomach contents with the composition of modern flora shows that many of present plants existed in this area already 30 thousand years ago. The only wood specie was larch; the underbrush comprised duschekia, dwarf birch and willow. Macereed grew on the banks of rivers and lakes; sedges, cotton grass, graminoids, valerian, persicaria prevailed in the low-relief places.

The time of death of the female bison is somewhere within the Karga Interglacial epoch. At that time open tundra areas and greenland-steppe woodless landscapes prevailed in these places. The warming that took place approximately 22-30 thousand years ago resulted in fewer forests and more marshes, reduction of poiums and meadow-steppe consocieta. In connection with this the conditions of life of large herbivorous animals aggravated, which eventually resulted in their disappearance.

Presently the remains of the Mylakhchin bison are kept at the Evolution and Ecology Institute under Russian Academy of Science in Moscow.