ISU bison skull bound for S. Dakota

A giant prehistoric bison skull owned by the Idaho State University’s Idaho Museum of Natural History is being shipped to South Dakota this weekend.

The skull will be on-loan to the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, S.D. for a minimum of 10 years. The specimen is used by national and international researchers to answer and capture new information, like DNA analysis.

“Our museum’s tagline is Discovering Idaho, One Story at a Time,” said Mary Thompson, senior collections manager at the Museum of Natural History. “By lending this specimen to South Dakota, we can tell the story about what Idaho and North America were like 20,000 to 200,000 years ago.”

The giant bison is one of the many prehistoric fossils in the Idaho Museum’s collections. The bison is the largest of all North American bison. It measures about 8 feet at the shoulder and weighed about 4,400 pounds. It is found in fossil sediments as early as 200,000 years ago. It existed until about 20,000 years ago.

The skull is part of a partial male skeleton. It is nicknamed “Howie,” after Howard Emry, who found the specimen in 1975.