The national mammal of the United States is getting in on America’s 250th birthday celebration. <\/p>\n
Three bison statues cast in bronze have taken up a permanent display outside the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The pieces \u2014 which are larger than real-life bison \u2014 made their public debut in the nation’s capital on Friday. <\/p>\n
The bison earned its official status as the nation’s mammal under a law signed by former President Obama in 2016. Millions of bison once roamed the Great Plains but were nearly driven to extinction in the 1800s. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful story of conservation working, it\u2019s a story of people seeing a need and getting behind that to conserve an animal that is specific to North America,\u201d said Gary Staab, a paleoartist who made the statues. <\/p>\n
Staab designed and sculpted the statues in Kearney, Missouri, where he works full-time to create sculptures of animals and historical artifacts for museums around the world. For the bison, Staab sculpted the full-size statues in foam and clay before they were cast in bronze and assembled at a foundry in Colorado. The three statues depict a bull, a cow and a calf. <\/p>\n
He said it took about four months to complete the sculptures \u2014 a time frame he called \u201clighting fast\u201d given the size of the pieces. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey really represent a really unbelievably beautiful and unique thing about North America,\u201d Staab said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The national mammal of the United States is getting in on America’s 250th birthday celebration. Three bison statues…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,115,263],"class_list":["post-359872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}