Lions and Elephants in North America

How would like to look out the window and see a lion or an elephant staring back at you? Well, this isn't some joke, because Cornell University researchers and their colleagues would like to bring cheetahs, lions, elephants, camels and other large wild animals to North America.

Harry Green agrees that this sound might sound a little bit wacky at first. "If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts," said the professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell. "But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven't thought about this as much as we have. Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent: Africa.", he added.

Greene and a number of other highly eminent ecologists and conservationists have authored a paper, published in the latest issue of Nature (Vol. 436, No. 7053), advocating the establishment of vast ecological history parks with large mammals, mostly from Africa, that are close relatives or counterparts to extinct Pleistocene-period animals that once roamed the Great Plains.

The plan, which is called Pleistocene rewilding and is intended to be a proactive approach to conservation, would help revitalize ecosystems that have been compromised by the extinction of many of the continent's large mammals, many of them predators. It would also offer ecotourism and land-management jobs to help the struggling economies in rural areas of the Great Plains and Southwest.

During the Pleistocene era, between 1.8 million to about 10,000 years ago, North America's ecosystems were much more diverse. As animals became extinct, many gaps developed in the web of interactions that makes up a healthy ecosystem. Introducing living counterparts to the extinct Pleistocene-period animals could fill the voids for American plants and animals that coevolved with large but now extinct mammals in the picture, the researchers said.


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