{"id":342511,"date":"2026-03-22T17:39:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T17:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/342511\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T17:39:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T17:39:06","slug":"americas-official-mammal-the-bison-gets-a-bronze-tribute-for-the-countrys-250th-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/342511\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s official mammal, the bison, gets a bronze tribute for the country’s 250th birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

KEARNEY, Mo. (AP) \u2014 The national mammal of the United States is getting in on\u00a0America\u2019s 250th birthday<\/a>\u00a0celebration.<\/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\u2019s capital on Friday.<\/p>\n

The bison\u00a0earned its official status<\/a>\u00a0as the nation\u2019s 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

Related: America 250: Learning from the past, looking to the future<\/a>
Patriotic quilts fill Garfield County courthouse for America\u2019s 250th celebration<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KEARNEY, Mo. (AP) \u2014 The national mammal of the United States is getting in on\u00a0America\u2019s 250th birthday\u00a0celebration. Three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-342511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}