The European bison (: 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 most 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, the remaining bison were hunted to extinction in the wild, with domestic bison later reintroduced into the wild.
By the late 2010s, the species numbered several thousand and had been returned to the wild by captive breeding programmes. It is no longer in immediate danger of extinction, but remains absent from most of its historical range. It is not to be confused with the aurochs (Bos primigenius), the extinct ancestor of domestic cattle, with which it once co-existed. Besides humans, bison have few predators. In the 19th century, there were scattered reports of wolves, lions, tigers, and bears hunting bison. In the past, especially during the Middle Ages, humans commonly killed bison for their hide, meat and other uses such as drinking horns.
European bison were hunted to extinction in the wild in the early 20th century, with the last wild animals of the B. b. bonasus subspecies being shot in the Białowieża Forest (on today's Belarus–Poland border) in 1921. The last of the Caucasian wisent subspecies (B. b. caucasicus) was shot in the northwestern Caucasus in 1927. The Carpathian wisent (B. b. hungarorum) had been hunted to extinction by 1852. The Białowieża or lowland European bison was kept alive in captivity, and has since been reintroduced into several countries in Europe. In 1996, the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified the reintroduced European bison as an endangered species, no longer extinct in the wild. Its status has improved since then, changing to vulnerable and later to near-threatened.
European bison were first scientifically described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. Some later descriptions treat the European bison as conspecific with the American bison. Three subspecies of the European bison existed in the recent past, but only one, the nominate subspecies (B. b. bonasus), survives today. The ancestry and relationships of the wisent to fossil bison species remain controversial and disputed. The European bison is one of the national animals of Poland and Belarus.
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 . Earlier, in the 4th century BC, during the Hellenistic period, Aristotle referred to bison as . He also noted that the Paeonians called it μόναπος (monapos).Aristotle (4th century BC): Των περί τα ζώα ιστοριών (History of Animals. Claudius Aelianus, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd centuries AD, also referred to the species as , and both Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Gaius Julius Solinus used and . Both Martial and Seneca the Younger mention (. ). Later Latin spellings of the term included , , and .
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 in English, as "bysontes" ( and ). 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 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 .
In the 18th century the name of the European animal was applied to the closely related American bison (initially in Latin in 1693, by John Ray) and the Indian bison (the gaur, Bos gaurus). Historically, the word was also applied to Indian domestic cattle, the zebu (B. indicus or B. primigenius indicus). Because of the scarcity of the European bison, the word 'bison' was most familiar in relation to the American species.
By the time of the adoption of 'bison' into Early Modern English, the early medieval English name for the species had long been obsolete: the had descended from , and was related to . The word 'wisent' was then borrowed in the 19th century from modern [], itself related to , , , and to , , , and ultimately, like the Old English name, from Proto-Germanic.
The word 'zubr' in English is a borrowing from , previously also used to denote one race of the European bison. The Polish żubr is similar to the word for the European bison in other modern Slavic languages, such as in Upper Sorbian; or in Ukrainian; (or ) or in Belarusian; and in Russian. The noun for the European bison in all living Slavonic tongues is thought to be derived from Proto-Slavic: *zǫbrъ ~ *izǫbrъ, which itself possibly comes from Proto-Indo-European: *ǵómbʰ- for tooth, horn or peg. In the Baltic countries of Lithuania and Latvia, where some bison populations persist as well, the animal is known as (plural: stumbrai) in Lithuanian and (plural: sumbri) in Latvian, respectively.
Description
The European bison is the heaviest surviving wild land animal in Europe. Similar to their American cousins, European bison were potentially larger historically than remnant descendants; modern animals are about in length, not counting a tail of , in height, and in weight for males, and about in body length without tails, in height, and in weight for females.Semenov U.A. of WWF-Russia, 2014, "The Wisents of Karachay-Cherkessia", Proceedings of the Sochi National Park (8), pp.23–24, , KMK Scientific Press At birth, calves are quite small, weighing between . In the free-ranging population of the Białowieża Forest of Belarus and Poland, body masses among adults (aged 6 and over) are on average in the cases of males, and among females. An occasional big bull European bison can weigh up to or moreBoitani, Luigi, Simon & Schuster's Guide to Mammals. Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Books (1984), Burnie D and Wilson DE (Eds.), Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World's Wildlife. DK Adult (2005), with old bull records of for lowland wisent and for Caucasian wisent.
On average, it is lighter in body mass, and yet slightly taller at the shoulder, than its American relatives, the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) and the plains bison (Bison bison bison).Gennady G. Boeskorov, Olga R. Potapova, Albert V. Protopopov, Valery V. Plotnikov, Larry D. Agenbroad, Konstantin S. Kirikov, Innokenty S. Pavlov, Marina V. Shchelchkova, Innocenty N. Belolyubskii, Mikhail D. Tomshin, Rafal Kowalczyk, Sergey P. Davydov, Stanislav D. Kolesov, Alexey N. Tikhonov, Johannes van der Plicht, 2016, "The Yukagir Bison: The exterior morphology of a complete frozen mummy of the extinct steppe bison, Bison priscus from the early Holocene of northern Yakutia, Russia", pp.7, Quaternary International, Vol.406 (25 June 2016), Part B, pp.94–110 Compared to the American species, the wisent has shorter hair on the neck, head, and forequarters, but longer tail and horns. See differences from American bison.
The European bison makes a variety of vocalisations depending on its mood and behaviour, but when anxious, it emits a growl-like sound, known in Polish as chruczenie (). This sound can also be heard from wisent males during the mating season.
History Prehistory The similar skeletal morphology of the wisent with the steppe bison (Bison priscus) which also formerly inhabited Europe complicates the understanding of the early evolution of the European bison. It is thought that European bison genetically diverged from steppe bison (as well as modern American bison, which are descended from steppe bison) at least 100,000 years ago. While nuclear DNA indicates that the two living bison species are each other's closest living relatives, the mitochondrial DNA of European bison is more closely related to that of aurochs and their domestic cattle descendants, which is suggested to be the result of either incomplete lineage sorting or ancient introgression, as result of interbreeding.
Genetic evidence indicates that European bison were present across Europe, from Spain (where a sedimentary ancient DNA record is known from El Miron Cave in Cantabriasupplemental material) to the Caucasus during the Last Glacial Period, where they co-existed alongside steppe bison. Cave paintings appear to distinguish between B. bonasus and B. priscus. Late Pleistocene European bison belong to two mitochondrial genome lineages (which a 2025 study estimated split from each other around 100,000 years ago), Bb1 (also known as Bison X, and sometimes controversially attributed to the species Bison schoetensacki, which is otherwise known from remains hundreds of thousands of years older) and Bb2. Bb1 has been found across Europe spanning from France to the Caucasus, while Bb2 was originally only found in the Caucasus, before expanding westwards at least by 22-21,000 years ago. At the end of the Last Glacial Period steppe bison became extinct in Europe, leaving European bison as the only bison species in the region. The Bb1 lineage became extinct at the beginning of the Holocene, with its youngest records dating to around 9900 years Before Present in southern Scandinavia, with all modern European bison belonging to the Bb2 lineage.
While some studies have estimated that modern European bison derive 10% of their ancestry from aurochs via interspecies gene flow, other authors have considered this a gross overestimate and based on flawed data, and not supported by the data from the full nuclear genome of the wisent, and that the actual contribution from aurochs/cattle around 2.4-3.2%, which is suggested to have occurred in the last 70,000 years.
Historically, the lowland European bison's range encompassed most of the lowlands of northern Europe, extending from the Massif Central to the Volga River and the Caucasus. It may have once lived in the Asiatic part of what is now the Russian Federation, reaching to Lake Baikal and Altai Mountains in east. The European bison is known in southern Sweden only between 9500 and 8700 BP, and in Denmark similarly is documented only from the Pre-Boreal.The Holocene distribution of European bison – the archaeozoological record. Norbert Benecke. Munibe (Antropologia_Arkeologia) 57 421–428 2005. . Refers to Liljegren R. and Ekstrom J., 1996. The terrestrial late Glacial fauna in south Sweden. In L. Larsson (Hrsg). The earliest settlement of Scandinavia and its relationship with neighbouring areas. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia 8, 24, 135–139, Stockholm. It is not conclusively recorded from the British Isles, nor from Italy or the Iberian Peninsula during the Holocene. However, in early 2026 a discovery of a skeleton belonging to the genus Bison was reported from the Sima de Arrafela cave in Navarre, Spain. The skeleton is estimated to be years old, dating to the Chalcolithic period, though its exact identity is uncertain pending genetic analysis.
Antiquity and Middle Ages