Bison latifrons Skeletal Bas Relief Study

 Bison latifrons was a species of bison common across North America during the Pleistocene, becoming extinct with many other megafauna at the end of the last ice age. Bison latifrons would have been clearly recognizable as a relative to today’s bison with a few very important and noticeable differences. For starters, Bison latrifons was enormous. Its mass has been estimated to have been up to 4000 pounds with a height at the shoulders of 8 feet and with a horn span, measured from tip to tip of 8 feet as well.  This makes Bison latifrons one of the largest or possibly the largest species of bovid that ever existed.

The sculpture was commissioned for the Cincinnati Museum Center’s Ice Age Gallery in 2020. I was asked to created a bison sculpture illustrating the skeleton of this animal in a Bas relief on one side of the sculpture and the sculpted life appearance of the animal on the other. To create this sculpture, I had access to a couple of invaluable resources. First, I used an interactive 3-D scan of a composite skeleton of Bison latifrons made available through the Idaho Museum of Natural History with funding assistance from the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation. Secondly, I had the technical expertise of Glenn Storrs, the vertebrate paleontologist with the Cincinnati Museum Center. For reconstruction of the soft tissue and integument, I looked at visual imagery from the American plains bison, the wood bison, the European bison or wisent, and lastly from cave paintings of the steppe bison.

I like this sculpture, it is exciting and captures what an impressive animal this species of bison really was.