A few more updates

After making a post with three "mini-topics" I now have... two more mini topics, later in the same day. Sigh.

First off, check out this article. https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/the-dungeons-dragons-movie-intentionally-emasculates-its-leading-men/ar-AA18704h

"We're not woke, we're just following every woke trope because contrary to the real world who's sick and tired of that garbage, we think it's fresh!" Liars. 

I didn't expect to like, or necessarily even watch that movie, but now I'll avoid it for sure. I won't even try and catch it on streaming. I mean, it looked like every garbage fantasy product of the last few years; the Willow show, the Rings of Power show, the dumb Witcher prequel, the Wheel of Time show, etc. So it's hardly surprising that it's going to be just as crappy for all of the same reasons as those, except without a coherent plot or characters from source material to screw up, at least. I've already addressed this in the past, but still relevant.

I'll pass. Entirely. 

Secondly, I found this image by a Russian paleo-artist who put a line-up of all of the bison of North America. I'm also a bit torn in my interpretation of what word to use for these animals. In America, since before the Revolutionary War, we've used the word buffalo (since 1616, apparently, where it was first noted that we know of). Normally, that would be that, and I'd prefer to say buffalo and ignore bison. However, there are competing claims on what word has more "teeth" in this game. The word bison is extremely old, Hellenistic Greeks from the 2nd century AD used the word βίσων which is Romanized as bison, spelled exactly the same as it still is today. If the Greeks and Romans called the animal (technically, the European version, of course—not the American ones. Although they are closely related) bison, that's a pretty compelling reason for using the same word. In Renaissance England (1611 and 1617 respectively, for two different references) the word bison was also being used in English. Curiously, although today bison is both singular and plural, it used to be that bison was singular and bisontes was plural, which is wild to me. An even earlier English reference, from 1398, uses this plural term, bysontes, with funky Medieval spelling. Bisontes also appears in a 1601 translation of a Latin original into English, and bison appears as a gloss in the marginalia of the King James Bible.

However, there are other competing claims. I wouldn't seriously suggest using these, because nobody would know what you're talking about, but Aristotle way back in the 4th century BC used the word βόνασος,which would be spelled in the Latin alphabet as bonasos, and transformed in Latin to bonasus. Curiously, the scientific name of the European bison today is Bison bonasus, for whatever that's worth. Claudius Aelianus, writing in the 2nd or 3rd century AD also used bonasus in Latin.

Finally, Old English had the word wesend, which referred to the European bison, but for whatever reason, it seems to have disappeared from English. Probably because there weren't any living on the islands, so the English stopped talking about them altogether. However, there are cognates in other Germanic languages to this word, including Old Norse visundr and Old High German wisunt, wisent (and other spelling variations.) While the word was lost in English, the modern German word Wisent has been borrowed back into English to describe this animal. Pronounced VEE-zent. The Old English word, depending on dialect, would have probably been WEE-send.

But there's no reason to use either of those words, unfortunately, even though I love them. It really comes down to bison vs buffalo. Bison, applied to the American animal, only dates back to the 1800s. And frankly, all of these species probably should have their own common name, but since they're no longer alive, they don't. If any of them were to somehow come back, maybe that's when we can talk about calling them bonases or wesends.

Anyway, here's the picture. And then I've got more to say about it too.

The last one, the most to the right, is the current American buffalo as seen in places like Yellowstone or South Dakota, etc. As you can see, it's also the smallest of the bunch. The origin of the two extant bison species is cloudy, and genetic research has made it more confusing rather than less so. Genetics seemed to indicate that the y-DNA (male side) was most closely related to the modern yak, while the mitochondrial DNA (female side) was more related to the aurochs, or modern taurine cattle. This raised the specter that the European bison was actually a hybrid. Which also raises the specter that hybridization plays more of a role in speciation than our current models suggest—but that's a bigger problem for another post someday.

The next bison to the left of the modern American bison is Bison priscus, or the steppe bison, which seems to have had by far the biggest range of all bison; from western Europe all the way to North America across Siberia, Berengia and what is today Canada down to the modern Great Plains. It's not clear if the European bison is a chronospecies of priscus, or if they coexisted for some time, but priscus is presumed to be the ancestor of all subsequent North American bison. 

The image above is lined up by size rather than chronology, which is a little bit too bad. Chronologically the next bison to appear in North America after the arrival of priscus is the big boy all the way to the left, Bison latifrons, or the giant bison or long-horned bison. The chronohistory of the species is that as climate changed during the pulses of the Ice Age, which caused significant drying of the continent and conversion of forest and oak savanas into prairie, that latifrons had a speciation event, and that its descendent is the "antique bison" or Bison antiquus (usually called ancient bison; but I like being cute and translating antiquus more directly.) That's the smaller horned big humped creature to the right of latifrons, still quite a big boy. These are common in the La Brea tar pits, for example, but fossils of them across the plains also seem to be common. Supposedly, the next to the right, Bison occidentalis speciated within antiquus, but also lived alongside it for some time. This new species was smaller yet again. These two species also seem to have possibly hybridized and the new chronospecies emerged, shrinking yet again, into the modern buffalo that we all know. This shrinking in size apparently allowed the buffalo to grow greater in numbers, hence the almost awe-inspiring site of early pioneers of an estimated over 60 million of them in the 1800s across the continent. No doubt it didn't hurt that most of the major predators (until we started killing them) were gone; no more Panthera atrox, dire "wolves", sabertooth cats, scimitar-toothed cats, etc. Just wolves and Injuns (and occasionally mountain lions and coyotes and bears, especially for young buffalo), and they weren't in a position to keep herds culled. 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; I really miss the fact that the big, exciting megafauna of the past is one that we missed here in North America. I also suspect that the scientific view that most of it was gone 10,000 years ago is probably not correct; most of them probably lingered longer than that, although which ones and for how long I couldn't begin to guess. There's plenty of compelling evidence that mammoths and mastodons, at least, were still around until the very eve of white man showing up to be told that he literally just missed them; grandpa Injun Joe remembers hunting them, etc.