4 . THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
found in the bed of a small creek about a dozen miles north of Big-bone 
Lick, Kentucky, and consisted of a part of a cranium with a considerable 
portion of one horn-core attached. This specimen was presented by Samuel 
Brown of Kentucky to the American Philosophical Society, and was first 
described and figured by Rembrandt Peale, in a paper entitled “ Account 
of Some Remains of a Species of gigantic Oxen found in America and other 
parts of the World.”* This specimen Peale believed indicated a species of 
the ox tribe of gigantic proportions whose horns must have had a spread of 
nearly twelve feet, — a conjecture that subsequent discoveries have proved 
well founded. 
This fragment, now deposited in the Museum of the Academy of Natural 
Sciences of Philadelphia, was repeatedly figured and described by different 
authors during the next thirty years, and has hence acquired great historic 
interest, being also the only remains of the larger extinct bison recognized 
from this continent for nearly half a century. Mr. Peale presented a plas- 
ter cast of this specimen to the Museum of Natural History of Paris at about 
the time of the publication of his essay on the subject of fossil oxen, and it 
was hence noticed almost simultaneously by M. Faujas-Saint-Fond,t who 
believed it specifically identical with a younger specimen discovered on the 
banks of the Rhine near Bonn, which he describes and figures in the same 
paper, without, however, giving the species a distinctive name.{ Peale’s 
specimen was next noticed by Cuvier§ in 1808, who redescribed and figured 
it from the cast sent by Mr. Peale to the Paris Museum. Cuvier regarded 
it as not only identical with the fossil bison of Europe, but referred both to 
the living aurochs (Bison bonasus), from which the fossil animal seemed to 
others were subsequently made known by other writers from many other localities. In 1832 Hermann 
von Meyer was able to give measurements of numerous skulls and a figure and description of the pelvis. 
J. F. Brandt, in his Zoographische und Palaeontologische Beitrige, published in 1867, gave a list of the 
localities at which its remains have been found, from which it appears to have been already met with in 
nearly every country of Europe and in Siberia. The most southerly point at which its remains have 
been found is in Upper Italy, skulls having been obtained near Pavia, on the Po. They have also been 
found in France, Switzerland, the British Islands, in Holland, Belgium, and Germany, especially about 
Mannheim on the Rhine, as well as in Sweden, Poland, Hungary, European Russia, and Greece. They 
have also been found at several localities in Asiatic Russia. 
* Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XV, pp. 825-327, pl. vi, 1803. 
t Ann. du Museum, Vol. I, p. 190, 1803. 
} It forms the “ Premitre Espéce ” of his essay, and is placed under the descriptive heading, “Baeuf fos- 
sil & cornes disposées presque horizontalement,” etc. 
§ Ann. du Museum, Vol. XII, p. 382, pl. xxxiv, fig. 2. 
¥ 
