North America just isn’t the same without its native camels, horses, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats. Not all of these can be brought back, but how about reintroducing what we can into the wild? And substituting elephants for mastodons, and lions for saber-toothed cats. That is the proposal in the November issue of The American Naturalist. The article, by Donlan et al., is entitled Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-First Century Conservation. It is not available online, but a news summary of it can be found at ScienceDaily. The abstract can be found here.

(Megafauna = large animals)

image from Wikipedia

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