Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The European bison.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
European bison ,Bison bonasus .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun European bison having a smaller and higher head than the North American bison
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Before Man came herds of wisent and mastodon kept the land mostly clear, and herds of white tail roamed.
Fantastic Settings marycatelli 2010
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Notable mammals include the reintroduced bison or wisent Bison bonasus (EN), wolf Canis lupus, lynx Felis lynx, otter Lutra lutra and European beaver Castor fiber, also reintroduced.
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In 1929 a small herd of four wisents was bought by the Polish state from various zoological gardens and from the Western Caucasus (where the wisent was to become extinct just several years afterwards).
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The first recorded piece of legislation on the protection of the forest dates to 1538 when a document issued by Polish king Zygmunt Stary (Sigismund I Old) instituted the death penalty for poaching a wisent (European bison).
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The forest was declared a hunting reserve in 1541 for the protection of wisent.
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European bison or wisent as they're known in Poland are distantly related to American bison and are different in that they are forest dwellers, rather than roaming the open prairie.
Archive 2007-10-01 2007
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European bison or wisent as they're known in Poland are distantly related to American bison and are different in that they are forest dwellers, rather than roaming the open prairie.
At My Table 2007
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The short-horned kind, with its hump and shaggy mane, was also fairly common east of the mountains; it closely resembled the familiar wisent of Europe.
A different flesh Turtledove, Harry 1988
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Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the auerochs.
Earth as Modified by Human Action, The~ Chapter 02 (historical) 1874
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Then slowe the dowghtie Sigfrid a wisent and an elk, he smote four stoute uroxen and a grim and sturdie schelk.
Earth as Modified by Human Action, The~ Chapter 02 (historical) 1874
knitandpurl commented on the word wisent
"As I crept along through the gloom, past engravings of wisent and aurochs and woolly rhinos, it occurred to me that I really had no clue what would drive someone to wriggle through a pitch-black tunnel to cover the walls with images that only another, similarly driven soul would see."
"Sleeping with the Enemy" by Elizabeth Kolbert, p 75 of the August 15th & 22nd, 2011 issue of the New Yorker
August 31, 2011