Fig. 10.11. A lone elephant scatters a pride of lions from their fresh kill near a water hole. Even a large pride of lions cannot kill healthy elephants and rhinos.
Fig. 10.12. Flight or fight. Flight or fight response depends on the nature of the predator (speed, strength, numbers) and prey (body size, speed, weaponry). At one extreme, rhinos and elephants will chase away the largest predators. On the other hand, extant bison and moose almost always run from wolves. African buffalo, which regularly experience predation by lions, are very pugnacious; they are one of Africa’s most dangerous large mammals. With lions for predators, it is likely that the temperament of steppe bison would have been more similar to that of African
Moose (Alces) are also not formidable prey. Moose hunters have often voiced wonder than an animal as enormous as a bull moose, with many-tined antlers up to two meters across, never attacks a hunter. If moose were more ferocious they would be less likely to be killed by humans in many situations. This defense strategy of escape seems maladaptive and must be understood in context of wolf predators rather than human hunters with guns. Charging a wolf with the intent to kill would be a relatively unsuccessful strategy for moose. Most moose escape by running, but once winded, it is better to stand and let the wolves come within kicking range. For the kinds of predation that recent and Holocene moose and bison encounter, it seems strategically better to respond with flight and a static defense rather than with a charge.
One wonders then if Pleistocene bison, which experienced predation by lions, would also react aggressively to human hunters. I think the answer has to be yes. For an animal the size of a buffalo, a more ferocious defense would have paid off in confrontation with lions. These earlier bison would have been formidable creatures to hunt for supper, which is, I propose, the very reason bison were not a daily part of the menu of late Paleolithic hunters. Their frequent portrayal in Paleolithic art now takes on a different tone. These are not pictures of livestock for the table, but of very dangerous bovines that must have been greatly respected, sought after, but at the same time feared. The three pictures from Paleolithic art that clearly show humans being attacked by dangerous animals portray bison (Guthrie 1984c). The famous drawing from Lascaux of a bison bull attacking a downed man (Leroi-Gourhan and Allain 1979) shows the bison wounded, its intestines spewing out of the spear wound (fig. 10.13). Of the other two, one is from Le Roc-de-Sers and the other from Villars, both in France.
These Paleolithic pictures thus corroborate the theory proposed above—that bovines normally preyed on by lions would be selected to fight when wounded rather than flee. We have every reason to think that such behavior would also spill over in response to human hunters. The aggressive attack of a wounded African buffalo was probably the reaction Bison priscus also had to human or lion hunters. It is unlikely Blue Babe went down on that cold early winter night without a fight.
Fig. 10.13. Dangerous Pleistocene bison. Although living bison are not particularly dangerous, some living bovids such as African buffalo have different predators than living bison. Since predators of Pleistocene bison were similar to those of African buffalo, it is likely that those bison were aggressive and dangerous to hunt. Some Paleolithic drawings of bison support this idea: (a) Lascaux, (b) Le Roc-de-Sers, and (c) Villars.
11
PREPARATION AND EXHIBITION OF BLUE BABE
Blue Babe was found in the summer of 1979, just weeks before I was to begin a year’s leave from the University of Alaska. Because European and Soviet paleontologists work with many of the same Pleistocene species and problems I do, I planned to travel to Europe and the Soviet Union to study museum collections and talk with colleagues. In addition, I wanted to see firsthand the Mammoth Steppe species portrayed in European Paleolithic art. In Alaska we have bones and mummies of these animals, but Germany, the Soviet Union, France, and Spain have drawings and sculptures of them. As soon as the bison was excavated, I deposited the entire carcass and many samples of silt from the site in a large freezer at the university. Locking Blue Babe away in a deep freeze for a year was frustrating—we had hardly taken a good look at him—but I knew it was important to establish a thorough program of analysis and preservation before thawing the carcass. I had never worked on such a well-preserved Pleistocene mummy, nor had anyone else in North America. I needed to correspond with and visit Soviet experts to learn from their work with Siberian frozen mummies. The sabbatical gave me the time I needed to think about the bison mummy and provided contacts with Soviet mammalogists and paleontologists so that I could do the best possible job with Blue Babe.
Scientific analysis of the carcass and sediments was more obvious to me than what to do with the mummy afterward. No large frozen Pleistocene mummy had ever been exhibited in North America in a mounted condition prepared by normal taxidermy methods, as are the Beresovka and Dima mammoths in the Zoological Museum in Leningrad. Furthermore our bison’s skin was not complete, and much of the hair was missing. When I flew to Europe on sabbatical, Blue Babe was a gray-brown ball of frozen mud. Although various people were enthusiastic about mounting and exhibition, I suspected they envisioned a richly pelted creature just taken from clear ice, when in fact Blue Babe was a scavenged assortment of grime and mud. I was less than enthusiastic about a simple assignment to a conventional taxidermist.
American taxidermy was at its zenith around the turn of the century. Carl Akeley at the Chicago Natural History Museum and others at the American Museum of Natural History were pioneering methods to produce amazingly realistic forms. Akeley’s new approach was to finely sculpt a clay mannequin of the original animal and then make a permanent cast of the mannequin in plaster and burlap. Tanned skin was stretched and sewn over this model of the animal, creating a lifelike mount. And although this technique spread throughout the world, the art of making original mannequins has all but been lost in the United States. “Stuffed animals” have gone out of vogue in large natural history museums and have been largely supplanted by ecology and Space exhibits. New exhibits that do contain mounted specimens are usually contracted to firms outside the museum. Few museums in America now have a full taxidermy staff; skills of mounting that once existed have been lost. The economics of production has forced most private taxidermists to send out skins to commercial tanneries and to use precast mannequins available in small, medium, large, and extra large. Labor is expensive, and a custom-made mannequin is a luxury few can afford. Thus, anatomical sculptural skills are unpracticed.
All of this left me in a quandary. I had done enough taxidermy to realize some of the problems this bison mummy might present. Fortunately for Blue Babe and myself, Bjorn Kurtén in the Department of Paleontology in Helsinki introduced me to Eirik Granqvist, who was then conservator at the Zoological Museum in Helsinki. The Helsinki museum operates on a low budget, but has one of the better large-mammal exhibits in Europe because of Eirik Granqvist’s skilled hands. He is a taxidermist trained in the classic method, doing everything from beginning to end by himself: collecting the animals, skinning, tanning, model building, casting his mannequins, and all other processes of taxidermy. Granqvist also ran a school at the Helsinki museum, training apprentices for careers in other museums or private business. He was a good self-trained anatomist and biologist and was most enthusiastic about working with the bison. While he agreed to travel to Alaska and do the taxidermy work to mount Blue Babe, finding funds for the job proved difficult.
I would remind the University of Alaska museum director several times annually that we needed to mount the bison mummy soon, but the museum had no extra funds available. Funds were sought from the Alaska State Legislature to no avail. I kept writing Granqvist that I hoped to find money soon. During the necropsy I had removed the skin where it was still attached to the head, legs, and lower part of the thorax (sternum and ribs) and, on Granqvist’s recommendation, had put the skin into large vats of 80% ethanol. After literally years of delay, finally, in exasperation, I came to the unilateral conclusion that the skin
would soon harden in the alcohol and that mounting had to be done in the next year or the specimen might be tragically ruined. At last some museum acquisition funds were reallocated for work on Blue Babe. We contacted Granqvist. A UNESCO-funded short course for African taxidermists in the Sahara and Sahel had fallen through when the U.S. had withdrawn from UNESCO, so Granqvist had an opening in his schedule for the spring of 1984. The Institute of Arctic Biology was willing to provide space and support for the taxidermy work as no space was available in the museum. The institute also contributed housing for Granqvist while he worked on the mummy.
During the time we waited for museum funding, I sculpted a three-dimensional scale model of Blue Babe using anatomical data from the carcass, pictures from European Paleolithic art, and a lot of trial and error and fussing. I sealed the plasticine clay model and made a mold of PVC rubber, into which a wax positive was poured. This wax bison was then cast in bronze by the lost-wax process.
When Granqvist arrived we took the bronze bison in hand and had a long session on how to mount Blue Babe. We concluded that a simple pile of head and skin, like the Dome Creek bison mummy on exhibit in the Smithsonian, was not sufficient, nor did we want a full standing mount. We decided that the position of the bison when it died, prone with legs gathered underneath, might be a good compromise.
With the scale model, Granqvist quickly used his artistic talents in laying out a plywood silhouette onto which he wired remaining limb bones and plywood cutouts of missing ones. He shaped chicken wire in the approximate contours of the body, and over this he sculpted a clay form of Blue Babe as he would have looked at death (fig. 11.1).
Granqvist made a rough plaster cast of the skull to attach to the life-sized clay form (see fig. 11.2, which diagrams the following description). I helped cast epoxy horns for the exhibit using PVC rubber molds made from Blue Babe’s real horns because I wanted to keep the actual head and horns frozen, available for future research.
During this time Granqvist also thoroughly cleaned and split the skin so that the thinned outer portion could be stretched over the plastic form he was about to produce. It was during this splitting that Granqvist found the carnassial tooth fragment of a lion lodged inside the thick fibrous dermis of the skin. Alcohol was washed from the skin and the hide was placed in an acid bath tanning solution.
Fig. 11.1. Preparing the museum exhibit. Eirik Granqvist is shown here modeling Blue Babe’s form in clay, using a small bronze study by the author for reference. (Photo by Don Borchardt)
Once Granqvist was satisfied that his life-size sculpture was accurate, he made a plaster piece-mold about 1.5 inches (35 mm) thick over the entire body, without undercuts (fig. 11.3). When fully set, this was removed and the model dismembered. Granqvist then reassembled the plaster mold and commenced to line it with a plaster coat backed with strips of burlap dipped in wet plaster. These added strength to the plaster, producing a strong, thin-walled mannequin over which to stretch the split and tanned skin.
After being tanned, the skin was treated with a commercial preservative that chemically locks open protein bonds, making it difficult for insect or microbial decomposers to attack the hide. The skin was then treated with a relaxant to maximize its stretchability and was finally pulled over the bison mannequin. It fit, almost. Some skin pieces were missing at the dorsal surface, where carnivores had first opened the carcass. But after the skin was relaxed and stretched it was obvious that there was more skin than I had first reconstructed, so I had to change my drawings. Thus, mounting directly helped my reconstruction. Granqvist tacked the wet skin in place with galvanized staples and allowed it to dry partially (fig. 11.4). A melted wax mixture was painted onto the skin and heated with a hair-dryer, causing the mixture to penetrate the dry skin. The wax filled spaces in the skin fibers and made the skin less likely to shrink or crack later. It also gave the skin a fresher appearance. Then we installed the cast horns and sealed their seam with wax. Seams in the skin were filled with colored wax, and the bison was ready to be recoated with vivianite, which had been removed when the skin was cleaned of its mud. Once again blue, the bison was carried across the street from the Institute of Arctic Biology to its case in the museum (fig. 11.5). Granqvist’s work was done.
Fig. 11.2. Mounting Blue Babe for exhibition.
Fig. 11.3. Making the plaster mold. Once the clay model was finished, a plaster mold was constructed in which to cast the final plaster and burlap form. Blue Babe’s tanned skin was then mounted on the completed form. (Photo by Don Borchardt)
Fig. 11.4. Blue Babe mount nearing completion. The wet, tanned skin was stretched over the form, tacked in place, and allowed to dry. (Photo by Don Borchardt)
Fig. 11.5. Blue Babe on permanent display at the University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks. (University of Alaska Museum photo)
To climax and celebrate Eirik Granqvist’s work with Blue Babe, we had a bison stew dinner for him and for Bjorn Kurtén, who was giving a guest lecture at the University of Alaska that week. A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables. We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.
APPENDIX A
JOHN V. MATTHEWS, JR. (Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa)
Fossil Arthropod Report No.: 81-17
Sample No.: Guthrie’s Bison mummy (vial 2)
Fossils
Insecta Coleoptera (“beetles”)
Carabidae (“ground beetles”)
Notiophilus sp.
Diacheila polita Fald.
Pterostichus parasimilis Ball
Pterostichus (Cryobius) sp.
Pterostichus (Cryobius) tareumiut Ball
Pterostichus (Cryobius) parasimilis Ball
Pterostichus (Cryobius) ventricosus Eschz.
Pterostichus (Cryobius) brevicomis Kirby
Pterostichus (Cryobius) nivalis Sahlb.
Pterostichus agonus Horn
Amara sp.
Staphylinidae (“rove beetles”)
Olophrum sp.
Lathrobium sp.
Tachinus apterus grp.
Byrrhidae (“pill beetles”)
Simplocaria sp.
Chrysomelidae (“leaf beetles”)
Chrysolina sp.
Curculionidae (“weevils”)
Lepidophorus lineaticollis Kirby
Hypera? sp.
Lepyrus gemellus Kirby
DIPTERA (“flies”)
Calliphoridae?
Comments
The assemblage has several paleoenvironmental implications. First, all of the taxa are either facultative or obligate tundra inhabitants, thus a treeless or nearly treeless environment existed at the time of deposition. . . . The dominance of the assemblage by members of the Cryobius group suggests mesic tundra, but note that fragments of the weevil Lepidophorus lineaticollis, a species of dry substrates, are also relatively abundant.
The assemblage resembles others from the Fairbanks mucks. For example, fragments of Cryobius are abundant, Morychus ( = Chrysobyrrhulus of Siberian literature) is present but rare, Tachinus is rare, and the weevil Vitavitus is missing entirely. But it differs from those, as well as from the insects associated with the Dawson Cut mammoth, by a rarity of Amara alpina fossils—another indication of the mesic tundra implications of the Bison mummy assemblage.
Another striking difference from the Dawson Cut assemblage is the lack of fossils of carrion insects. The only possible exception is a single puparial fragment of a blow fly (Calliphoridae). The Dawson Cut assemblage contained an abundance of Calliphorid puparia plus fossils of two carrion feeding species of the beetle genus Silpha.
Silpha lapponica and several other carrion feeders (e.g., Nitidula, Creophilus maxillosus L., Cleridae and blow-fly puparia) were collected by Guthrie at the site of a modern Bison carcass. Some of these species do not ordinarily occur in a tundra environment, one possible expl
anation of their absence from the Bison mummy, but the absence of all carrion forms in the Bison mummy assemblage is remarkable. It must mean that the carcass was exposed for only a short time, probably during the winter of a single year, before being buried and frozen.
A rarity of carrion species is what one might expect of a well preserved carcass. Excellent preservation of soft tissues cannot occur if they are exposed for long to carrion feeders.
The insects associated with the Berelekh mammoth concentration also lack carrion species, but the samples are so small as to make such negative evidence very suspect. The Bison mummy sample, though also small, is large enough to make the absence of carrion species significant.
Appendix B
DR. JAMES H. ANDERSON (Institute of Arctic Biology, Fairbanks)
Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe Page 29