fossil bison species remain controversial and disputed. The European bison is one of the national animals of Poland and Belarus. Etymology The ancient Greeks and ancient Romans were the first to name bison as such; the 2nd-century AD authors Pausanias and Oppian referred to them as . Earlier, in the 4th century BC, during the Hellenistic period, Aristotle referred to bison as . He also noted that the Paeonians called it μόναπος (monapos). Claudius Aelianus, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd centuries AD, also referred to the species as , and both Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Gaius Julius Solinus used and . Both Martial and Seneca the Younger mention (. ). Later Latin spellings of the term included , , and . John Trevisa is the earliest author cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as using, in his 1398 translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum, the Latin plural in English, as "bysontes" ( and ). Philemon Holland's 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History, referred to "bisontes". The marginalia of the King James Version gives "bison" as a gloss for the Biblical animal called the "pygarg" mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy. Randle Cotgrave's 1611 French–English dictionary notes that was already in use, and it may have influenced the adoption of the word into English, or alternatively it may have been borrowed direct from Latin. John Minsheu's 1617 lexicon, Ductor in linguas, gives a definition for Bíson (). In the 18th century the name of the European animal was applied to the closely related American bison (initially in Latin in 1693, by John Ray) and the Indian bison (the gaur, Bos gaurus). Historically the word was also applied to Indian domestic cattle, the zebu (B. indicus or B. primigenius indicus). Because of the scarcity of the European bison the word ‘bison’ was most familiar in relation to the American species. By the time of the adoption of ‘bison’ into Early Modern English, the early medieval English name for the species had long been obsolete: the had descended from , and was related to . The word ’wisent’ was then borrowed in the 19th century from modern [], itself related to , , , and to , , , and ultimately, like the Old English name, from Proto-Germanic. The , also found in weasel, originally referred to the animal's musk. The word ‘zubr’ in English is a