The Large Animal Research Station is located on a 134-acre former homestead near the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. The original goal was to establish a colony of musk oxen available for nutritional, physiological, and behavioral research. Musk oxen were extirpated from Alaska in the late 1800s. To reintroduce the species, 34 young musk oxen were captured in Greenland in 1930 and brought to Fairbanks. The animals were then transferred to Nunivak Island, about thirty miles west of the central west Alaskan coast, the second largest island in the Bering Sea. Most of the island is part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. By the late 1960s there were over 700. Small populations were then transferred back to the Alaskan mainland in the Seward Peninsula, Kotzebue Sound, and the North Slope. There are now an estimated 4000 musk oxen in Alaska.
