European bison
European bison
The European bison (pl.: bison) (Bison bonasus) or the European wood bison, also known as the wisent ( or ), the zubr (), or sometimes colloquially as the European buffalo, is a European species of bison. It is one of two extant species of bison, alongside the American bison. The European bison is the heaviest wild land animal in Europe, and individuals in the past may have been even larger than their modern-day descendants. During late antiquity and the Middle Ages, bison became extinct in much of Europe and Asia, surviving into the 20th century only in northern-central Europe and the northern Caucasus Mountains. During the early years of the 20th century, bison were hunted to extinction in the wild.
Etymology
The ancient Greeks and ancient Romans were the first to name bison as such; the 2nd-century AD authors Pausanias) and Oppian referred to them as βίσων, bisōn. Earlier, in the 4th century BC, during the Hellenistic period, Aristotle referred to bison as βόνασος, bónasos. He also noted that the Paeonians called it μόναπος (monapos). Claudius Aelianus, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd centuries AD, also referred to the species as βόνασος, and both Pliny the Elder's Natural History) and Gaius Julius Solinus used Latin: bĭson and bonāsus. Both Martial and Seneca the Younger mention bison (pl. bisontes). Later Latin spellings of the term included visontes, vesontes, and bissontes.
Etymology
John Trevisa is the earliest author cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as using, in his 1398 translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum, the Latin plural bisontes in English, as "bysontes" (Middle English: byſontes and bysountes). Philemon Holland's 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History, referred to "bisontes". The marginalia of the King James Version gives "bison" as a gloss) for the Biblical animal called the "pygarg" mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy. Randle Cotgrave's 1611 French–English dictionary notes that bison was already in use in French, and it may have influenced the adoption of the word into English; alternatively, it may have been borrowed directly from Latin. John Minsheu's 1617 lexicon, Ductor in linguas, gives a definition for Bíson in Early Modern English: "a wilde oxe, great eied, broad-faced, that will neuer be tamed".
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