The last wild wisent was shot in 1927; captive herds brought it back
The European bison, or wisent, is Europe's heaviest wild land animal. Hunters wiped out every wild herd in the early twentieth century, the last lowland animals falling in Białowieża Forest in 1921. Captive breeding has since returned several thousand to the wild, though they still occupy only a fraction of their old range.
It is one of just two living bison species, the other being the American bison, and some older descriptions even treated the two as one. Linnaeus described it scientifically in 1758. Animals in the past may have been bigger than today's. By late antiquity and the Middle Ages it had disappeared from most of Europe and Asia, hanging on into the twentieth century only in north-central Europe and the northern Caucasus. People hunted it for hide and meat and turned its horns into drinking vessels, while nineteenth-century reports mention wolves, bears, lions and tigers taking bison; otherwise it has few predators. It should not be confused with the aurochs, the extinct wild ancestor of domestic cattle, which once lived alongside it.
Three subspecies survived into recent times, and two were lost. The Carpathian wisent was gone by 1852. The last wild lowland animals were shot in 1921 in Białowieża Forest on today's Belarus-Poland border, and the final Caucasian wisent was killed in the northwestern Caucasus in 1927. Only the lowland form survived, in captivity, and its descendants have been released in several European countries.
Conservation status has improved in steps. In 1996 the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the reintroduced population as endangered rather than extinct in the wild, later upgrading it to vulnerable and then near-threatened. Several thousand animals existed by the late 2010s, enough to lift the threat of imminent extinction. It is a national animal of both Poland and Belarus, although its links to fossil bison remain disputed.
The name has a long classical trail. Aristotle in the fourth century BC called the animal bonasos and noted a Paeonian name, monapos. Pausanias and Oppian in the second century AD used bison, and Pliny the Elder, Martial and Seneca all mention it. In English, John Trevisa wrote bysontes in a 1398 translation, the King James Bible's margins glossed the mysterious pygarg as bison, and John Minsheu's 1617 lexicon defined it as a wild, broad-faced ox that would never be tamed.
Source: European bison
