Yellowstone Had 23 Pure Bison Left What Their DNA Revealed 120 Years Later Was Impossible

In the early 1900s, the last wild bison in America had collapsed to just 23 animals in Yellowstone, the final survivors of a species that once numbered in the tens of millions. They were pulled back from the edge by a handful of determined people, and today there are half a million bison across the continent. But more than a century later, scientists ran a DNA test on the "purest" wild bison on Earth, the famous Yellowstone herd, and found something that was never supposed to be there, a hidden secret buried in their genes that quietly rewrites the whole story of how they were saved. This is what the DNA revealed, and why the purest bison in America were never quite what we believed. Yellowstone Had 23 Pure Bison Left What Their DNA Revealed 120 Years Later Was Impossible