Anniversary For A Museum Outlaw

The 4th Floor 'Outlaw'

Published by Dr.Mooi, Curator of Zoology
rmooi@manitobamuseum.ca
February 8, 2012

Just outside my office on the 4th floor of the Museum is a big, hairy outlaw that can stare anybody down. It’s the mounted head of one of the original ‘outlaw buffalo’ of the Pablo/Allard herd of Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), the most significant of the private herds purchased by the Canadian government that helped to bring these magnificent animals back from the brink of extinction.

By 1890, it is believed that there were no bison remaining in Canada. Several private herds started from wild stock during the 1870s were obtained by the Canada government beginning in 1897. The Pablo/Allard herd, the origin of the Museum ‘outlaw’, had its beginnings in about 1872 when Walking Coyote, a member of the Pend d’Oreille First Nation, captured a handful of animals south of the Alberta/Montana border.

Read the full blogpost here.

From the Manitoba Museum - Geology and Paleontology Blog

Published by Dr. Graham Young

 gyoung@manitobamuseum.ca

Ever since the Museum’s Earth History Gallery opened in the early 1970s, visitors have been struck by the appearance of a giant skeleton near the end of the gallery. Many children (and perhaps more than a few adults) have thought that it is a dinosaur, but it is in fact a mammal from the much more recent past, a replica of the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum.

Megatherium was a huge ground-dwelling creature, distantly related to the modern tree sloths. Ground sloths were a very successful group, with fossils known from many parts of South and North America (including western Canada), but sadly they disappeared...

Read the rest here...