KEARNEY, Mo. \u2014 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’s 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 Barack Obama in 2016. Millions of bison once roamed the Great Plains but were nearly driven to extinction in the 1800s.<\/p>\n
“It’s a wonderful story of conservation working, it’s a story of people seeing a need and getting behind that to conserve an animal that is specific to North America,” 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 “lighting fast” given the size of the pieces.<\/p>\n
“They really represent a really unbelievably beautiful and unique thing about North America,” Staab said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KEARNEY, Mo. \u2014 The national mammal of the United States is getting in on America’s 250th birthday celebration.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1147,1302,3811,473,3812,134,3729,7221,3,3813,3814,79,99,1505,2987,3324,2986,201],"class_list":["post-539712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-history","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-nature","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-science","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}