Denver museum's missing bison returns after more than 60 years
October 7, 2025 | In the PressFrom 9News.com (https://www.9news.com/article/life/animals/denver-museums-missing-bison-found/73-e4ea5696-b475-46af-91c2-a30ffc71add2)
For decades, museumgoers and staff have traded theories about what happened to one of Colorado’s oldest museum residents — a 650-pound bison mount that vanished from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Former employees passed the legend down to new hires. “We always knew we had five bison in our founding collection,” said Andrew Doll, the museum’s collections manager for zoology and health sciences. “But for decades, we only had four.”
The missing bison was part of a quintet prepared by 19th-century naturalist Edwin Carter, whose specimens became the first mammals cataloged in the museum’s collection. Sometime before 1965, one disappeared without a trace.
“We’d heard all sorts of rumors — some people said Wyoming — but the truth was that nobody really knew,” Doll said.
That mystery became something of a local legend — until last year, when it turned out the taxidermy bison hadn’t gone far at all.
When Rebecca Jacobs, curator at the Buffalo Bill Museum on Lookout Mountain, started digging into a bison mount sitting in the museum’s gift shop.
“I started looking into it to begin with because I really didn't know anything about the bison taxidermy mount and why it was in our gift shop,” she said.
After talking with Natalie Patton, a former DMNS staffer, Jacobs realized it might be the museum’s missing bison. She and Patton contacted Andrew Doll, who confirmed the match — spotting the same distinctive gouge in the horn seen in 1920s photos.
“Right away, when I first saw it,” Doll said. “Pretty clearly, like this, this was the bison.”
How the animal ended up there may never be fully explained. Jacobs said it was probably moved in the mid-20th century, when Denver’s museums and zoo were jointly managed by the city and loans were often made on handshake agreements.
“Things weren’t necessarily documented as clearly with all the paperwork like we do today,” said Doll.
Last year, staff from both institutions — along with Denver Mountain Parks — dismantled doors, built a ramp and carefully rolled the 650-pound mount out of the century-old Pahaska building and into a box truck bound for Denver.
Despite decades of sunlight and souvenir-shop dust, the bison remains in good condition. It is now stored in the museum’s climate-controlled Avenir Collections Center, reunited with the four other Carter bison.
Jacobs said returning it felt like “a win-win for both sides.”
“It’s not a loss for us,” she added. “It’s an upgrade for the bison.”
For Doll, the rediscovery closed one of the museum’s longest-running mysteries. “It completes the record,” he said. “We finally know where it went.”
And, as Jacobs put it, the decades the bison spent on Lookout Mountain have simply become one more chapter added to its story.
"When we think about objects, we a lot of times think about like their first second and third lives. And so that's just one more story to add to it," said Jacobs.
