No, animals are not leaving Yellowstone National Park - Yellowstone Volcano Observatory
No, animals are not leaving Yellowstone National Park
Online sources are saying that animals are fleeing Yellowstone National Park. This isn’t the first time such claims have been made. And just like before, they aren’t true.
Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. This week's contribution is from Michael Poland, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and Scientist-in-Charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
Here we go again.
The Internet is abuzz with claims that animals are fleeing Yellowstone National Park and suggesting that the bears, elk, and other creatures know something about Yellowstone’s volcanic system that humans don’t.
Hogwash.
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The nonsense seems to have started on July 10, 2025, when a social media post suggested that “hundreds” of mountain lions were leaving Yellowstone National Park, heading south—never mind that there are only about 40 of those animals in the entire park. The video showed cougars walking on a snowy paved road, which is obviously not how Yellowstone looks in July.
A few days later, the rumors went into overdrive when the same account shared a video of bears walking past a few cars—the claim was, once again, that they were leaving Yellowstone. The animals were hugely fat and not behaving as they would in the wild, and the landscape and vegetation looked nothing like Yellowstone. Internet sleuths eventually traced the location of the video to a drive-through wildlife park in South Dakota.
Not that such inconsistencies mattered. Millions of people viewed the original post and the claims went viral, repeated and modified on numerous other platforms and made more and more fantastic and ominous. One post showed a herd of wildebeest crossing a river in Africa. It’s not clear if that post was trying to be sarcastic. Soon, even major media outlets were covering the “story,” and Yellowstone National Park staff members and YVO Consortium scientists had to give interviews to counter the rumors.
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The original post seems to have been a joke, but just like the children’s game of telephone, the more the story was retold, the more it was twisted. The flames might have been fanned by this very Caldera Chronicles column, which on July 14, 2025, described the discovery of a new thermal feature in Norris Geyser Basin. That story, too, was picked up and reposted, but often with worrying overtones—for example, that scientists were supposedly “baffled” by the appearance of the new hot spring. Maybe this is why all the bears were leaving Yellowstone? Except, of course, the spring at Norris Geyser Basin formed in December 2024, and several new features like that appear every year across the park—for example, the steaming vent near Nymph Lake between Norris Geyser Basin and Mammoth Hot Springs that formed in August 2024.
The myth that animals are leaving Yellowstone is nothing new. This rumor comes up every year or two, and sometimes, as in 2025, it grows to ridiculous proportions.
In 2014, an employee of a Yellowstone nonprofit organization filmed several bison running along a road and posted it online—he thought it was a fun video and not at all abnormal, given that bison are always running around Yellowstone National Park. But the video took on a life of its own, and it was reposted by people claiming the bison were running away from the park, even though they were actually running toward the park’s interior.
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More than two weeks after the 2014 video was filmed, a M4.8 earthquake occurred near Norris Geyser Basin—the strongest earthquake in the region since 1975. This caused a further surge in claims that animals were running away, with some suggesting that the video of bison running was filmed after the earthquake because a volcanic eruption was imminent. The speculation became so widespread that Yellowstone National Park put out a “rumor control” video explaining that, in fact, animals were not stampeding away from the park.
Earlier in 2025 a social media site known for satirical content showed a doctored photo of dozens of bears sitting on a road, supposedly in Yellowstone, and saying that the animals were blocking the entrances. Some bears were even carrying crudely drawn signs. Most people got the joke, but misleading reposts of the story caused concern among some who thought the animals knew something we didn’t.
Because of its incredible natural history and environment, Yellowstone can inspire our imagination. Where else but America’s first national park could you take in a view shaped by massive volcanic eruptions and featuring some of the country’s most iconic wildlife?
Perhaps, then, it is not a surprise that fantastic stories sometimes accompany this fantastic landscape. But the next time you hear that animals are, once again, fleeing Yellowstone in droves, we would suggest a healthy dose of skepticism. At least until those bears with signs learn to write more legibly, anyway.
