Wait. I need to know more about the Aperture Science dinosaur in 1889.
So I’m not bothered by the inconsistent scale… but why is there a dinosaur peeking through the bottom of the 1889 column?!
They were closing in on extinction?
Settlers killed buffalo to force indigenous people into the reservation system. It was a big part of the genocide here, worth looking into if you get the chance.
This is a buffalo:

They are not the same animal as American bison, which are also not European bison for that matter.
Isn’t that a water buffalo? Not the same animal as the American Bison (commonly known as the American Buffalo.) I think once they have a 200 year old city named for them, you just have to accept that that’s what they’re called.
Isn’t that a water buffalo?
or as you woul call it a water bison…
Also the city was not on land, which had American bison, so no it is not named after the animal.
Each buffalo in the first picture represents 242,914 buffalo. Which means the last picture would be about 1/10th of a bison, and the middle one would be just the tip of a horn.
THERE! ARE! FOUR!
LIGHTSBISONS!!There are 300 bison! presses button*
I don’t know the history of bison population. From the image, I assume there used to be a ton of bison. But then a science experiment involving velociraptors went awry, and only a small group of bison were left alive. Then those bison made an uprising against the velociraptor-experiments and invaded their area, allowing their population to grow again.
How far off am I?
Well, what did you expect from Aperture Science?
I like the optimistic message but the graph scale is throwing me
What is the genetic diversity of the bison? Are they are going to be very inbred soon and die out?
No.
TIL There are 30,000 free roaming bison but there are 500,000 total including privately owned and commercial herds.
Yep. They are also far better for the land they graze on than cattle, as they evolved here, and so they generally eat only what they should and don’t overgraze. The meat is also far leaner and healthier than beef. We really should stop raising cattle and raise bison. The biggest issue is even “domesticated” bison are far more wild and dangerous to raise than the cattle we have bred to be docile. So risk averse ranchers are not interested.
Yeah, American bison don’t take well to husbandry, simply because they’re aggressive. They’re territorial and have bad eyesight, so their first inclination when they see a human-sized blob is usually to attack.
But yes, if you’re going to eat red meat, bison is much better than beef. It’s so lean that natives could dry it and pound it into powder for trail snacking. You can’t do that with modern beef, because it has too much fat. Even beef jerky tends to be pretty greasy.
30,000 is roughly 1/3 of 60,000,000.
VERY roughly. Lol
Logarithmically scaled image. I’ll leave the determination of the base of the Log as an exercise for the viewer.
I would show my proof, but I don’t have enough space in this margin
I’m here for this comment all day.
well, we know bison in the middle are worth approximately 75 each…
OBVIOUSLY!!
yeah this graphic is terrible
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…are you a bot trying to trick users into pedantically identifying images for your training data? Cus these are not what you claim the are.
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Yeah, we need 799613 more bison images to justify the graphic.
It’s only off by roughly 20,000,000
Because they finally caged the velociraptor in the middle image?
It turns out that we were the velociraptors all along.
Look at the gunbarrel around it. That’s the velociraptor equivalent of James Bond. You can’t put it in a cage.
It’s the veliciraptor you’re aiming at, while the clever girl is watching you.
Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.
With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.
The decision to stop was required, but a ton of work was done to help the population rebound. What kind of misguided message is this trying to send?
It’s trying to tell people who think it’s too much work to bother that it’s not. I do it all the time, like when I have to wash the dishes and I tell myself “I’ll just wash one dish” because I know if I do that I’ll be a lot more motivated to continue, but if I keep looking at the whole problem before I start, I’ll be too overwhelmed to do anything at all.
That’s about how I read it. Sometimes you don’t have a solution to fix a problem, but ceasing to make it worse is a valuable course of action in itself. The bison aren’t back the way they were, but they’re not extinct either.
Sure, the bison population is 0.05% of what it once was. And now that we’re not actively attempting to extinct them, everything is hunky dory and no more work is needed.
I don’t know how else to interpret this. It sounds like the Bison Society would rather be a society dedicated to literal anything else. The Kick the Can Down the Road Society, perhaps.
Each of the bison shapes in the 60mil example are actually clusters of bison so small you can’t see them with the naked eye.
Jokes on you, I wear glasses and still can’t see them
Jokes on you, I have no eyes and I can’t even read what you said.
The jokes on you, the post you couldn’t read contains the winning lottery numbers.
Jokes on you, those winning lottery numbers were for the hunger games. Here’s your bow and arrow
Each bison image is worth 75 bison according to the middle section.
Joke’s on you, my eyes are the only part of me that isn’t naked right now.
I think it gets the point across even if it’s off by orders of magnitude.
I get that, but I personally think 60,000,000 tiny buffalo would be more impactful. Can someone do a quick edit in Photoshop?
There’s not even 60,000,000 pixels in that image.
Well not with that attitude.
We just need dithering with different levels of grey representing a different amount of Bison, arranged so that the macro pattern still registers as a Bison; but in fact it would be a mega Bison.














