I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to extinct megafauna.
I love a good dinosaur, like any normal, overgrown boy, but what really gets me juiced are the Pleistocene mega-mammals that lived in the Americas until about 11,000 years ago. Those animals lived in a North America that was a closer approximation of the landscape that exists today, as compared to the Tyrannosaurus-rex harboring Cretaceous period, when an inland sea divided the continent.
Of course, the North America of the Pleistocene was still quite different from the world we inhabit. The Last Glacial Period was ending, meaning Missoula would soon be suitable habitat for a wide diversity of brewpubs frequented by graduate-student hipsters sporting Snidely-Whiplash mustaches, as compared to the ice-dam flooded hellscape it was until the beginning of the Holocene glacial retreat.
There remain fragments of the Pleistocene on the landscape today. All highways leading to my old stomping grounds in Southern California run through forests of Joshua trees, and as I drive past, I can’t help but think of giant sloths, lounging about as they ate the fruits of the giant yucca plants, named after the Old Testament prophet of the same name by Mormon settlers.
These weren’t the biggest of the giant sloths, some of which were as large as an elephant. These were smaller Shasta ground sloths, a bear-sized beast that certainly would have been a handful if provoked.
We now have a pretty good idea that ground sloths played a key role in the spread of Joshua trees. The yucca’s seeds passed through the digestive tract of sloths intact. We know this because preserved sloth dung was discovered in a Nevada cave, along with sloth bones. It seems likely the beasts spread the seeds far and wide. More recently, climate change has further reduced the range of Joshua trees.
Researchers have raised hopes they may eventually clone one of the animals which shared Pleistocene North America with giant sloths: the wooly mammoth.
A particularly well-preserved mammoth carcass found in Siberia produced the complete genome of the species, suggesting scientists just might go full Jurassic Park and de-extinct them. The Indian elephant is a close match to the mammoth, so if scientists can replace the DNA of a fertilized elephant egg with that of an extinct wooly mammoth, ginger pachyderms may once again walk among us.
By the way, I’m all for this experimentation. Some folks worry it’s foolhardy tampering with nature like this. Well, half the food on grocery shelves is genetically engineered these days and we’ve been experimenting with far more dangerous things such as nuclear power and weapons, yet some folks worry reanimating wooly mammoths will bring about the apocalypse.
Just because evil scientists are an overused plot device in American cinema doesn’t mean I’m gonna fear cool stuff like bringing back extinct elephants.
While they’re at it, those scientists ought to give a cloned T. rex a try too, if they can reproduce the DNA of the GOAT of all land carnivores. I know Jurassic Park ended poorly, but that was an operation so shoddily run that Wayne Knight — Newman from the old Seinfeld sitcom — was able to take it down in a hastily executed attempt to steal the dino park’s trade secrets.
If I were in charge of the T. rex project, I’d release the reanimated beasts in paleontologist Jack Horner’s backyard so he could lecture them about how they’re obviously scavengers, not predators.
But what I’d most like to see de-extincted is a short-faced bear. Standing more than 10 feet tall, this was a bear not to be messed with. Some wise guys — the sort of folks you’d expect to find at a party at the Horner residence, spoiling all the fun — decided the bears had to be scavengers, as well.
You know who’s backyards get to house the reanimated short-faced bears, right?