A park ranger recently told my tour group Bison and Buffalo are the same. My research indicates they are different animals from different continents. What is the real answer?

They are different species. However, even in the Buffalo genus there are many differences. Remember, the Buffalo nickel was misnamed too. Genetically they are probably 99% the same.

The ranger was correct. The AMERICAN 'buffalo' IS the bison. European settlers called them buffalo after the Asian buffalo they had seen, for lack of a better word.

Many native people don't like the term bison, however, and prefer buffalo, so it gets a little confusing.

Buffalo don't roam across the United States and Bison don't roam across Asia and Africa, cousins maybe, both are huge with Buffalo winning the ugly contest.

"In North America, the names are used interchangeably for the species Bison bison," Ross MacPhee, Curator of the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, said. But though both bison and buffalo are bovids, or members of the cattle family, there are some definite differences between them. "Elsewhere—in non-English-speaking Europe, for example—a bison is the European Bison, Bison bonasus, a species very closely related to B. bison," MacPhee says. "A buffalo is either a Cape Buffalo Syncerus (Africa), or Water Buffalo Bubalus (South Asia), neither of which are closely related to either kind of bison."