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Archeological Count of Bison Bones
Q: How many bones does a bison have?
A: “For me, a bison has between 218 and 248 bones (depending if count only permanent teeth or permanent and deciduous), and whether includes costal cartilage or not (while named cartilage, these ossify and preserve as bones in archaeological and paleontological setting and hence need counting when we develop our MNI [minimum number of individuals] estimates for an assemblage). There are other smaller bones like in the hyoid group where there are 11 total bones where I count only the two larger, more durable (stylohyoids) because I never have found the others archaeologically.”
