Listen to part of a lecture in a zoology class.

A mass extinction is when numerous species become extinct over a very short time period, short, geologically speaking, that is, like when the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

And the fossil record, it indicates that in all the time that animals have inhabited Earth, there have been five great mass extinctions, dinosaurs being the most recent.

In each of the others up to half of all land animals and up to 95% of marine species disappeared.

Well, Today we are witnessing a sixth mass extinction, but unlike the others, the current loss of biodiversity can be traced to human activity.

Since the Stone Age, humans have been eliminating species and altering ecosystems with astounding speed.

Countless species have disappeared due to over-hunting, habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation, pollution and other unnatural human causes.

So, as a way of repairing some of that damage, a group of conservation biologists has proposed an ambitious, or, some might say, a radical plan, involving large vertebrates, or, megafauna.

Megafauna include elephants, wild horses, big cats, camels, large animals.

Eh, actually, the proposal focuses on a particular subset of megafauna, the kind that lived during the Pleistocene epoch.

OK.

The Pleistocene epoch, most commonly known as the Ice Age, stretched from 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.

In the Americas, most megafauna began disappearing by the end of the pleistocene.

So here is a biologist's idea.

Take a select group of animals, Megafauna from places like Africa and Asia, and introduce them into other ecosystems similar to their current homes, beginning in the Western Unite Stats.

They call their plan Pleistocene rewilding.

Now the advocates of Pleistocene rewilding cite two main goals.

One is to help prevent extinction of some endangered megafauna by providing new refuges, new habitats for them.

The other is to restore some of the evolutionary and ecological potential that has been lost in North America.

What do I mean by restore evolutionary potential?

Well, as you know, the evolution of any species is largely influenced by its interaction with other species.

So during the Pleistocene epoch... let's take the now extinct American "Cheetah" for instance.

We believe it played a pivotal role in the evolution of the pronghorn antelope, the antelope's amazing speed, to be exact, because natural selection would favor those antelope that could outrun a cheetah.

When the America cheetahs disappeared, their influence on the evolution of pronghorn and presumably on other prey animals stopped.

So it is conceivable that the pronghorn antelope would have continued to evolve, get faster maybe, if the cheetah was still around.

That's what means by evolutionary potential.

Importing African Cheetahs to the western Unite State could, in theory, put the pronghorn back onto its... natural evolutionary trajectory according to these biologists.

Another example is interaction of megafauna with local flora, in particular, plants that rely on animals to disperse their seeds.

Like pleistocene rewilding could spark the re-emergence of large seeded the American plants, such as the maclura tree.

Many types of maclura used to grown in North America, but today, just one variety remains and it is found in only two states.

In the distant past, large herbivores like mastodons dispersed maclura seeds, each the sizes of an orange in the droppings.

Well, there aren't any mastodons left, but there are elephants, which descended from mastodons.

Introduce elephants into that ecosystem and they might disperse those large maclura seeds, like their ancestor did.

Get the idea?

Restoring some of the former balance to the eco-system?

But as I alluded to earlier, Pleistocene rewilding is extremely controversial.

A big worry is that these transplanted megafauna might devastate plants and animals that are native to the western United States.

In the year since the Pleistocene epoch, native species have adapted to the changing environment there.

Plants, smaller animals, they have been evolving without megafauna for millennia.

Also animal species that went extinct 11000 year ago, uh, some are quite differently genetically from their modern-day counterparts, like elephants do not have thick coats like their mastodon ancestors do when they graze in the prairie of the America West during the Ice Age.

Granted, the climate today is not as cold as it was in Pleistocene.

But winters on the prairie can still get pretty harsh today.

And there are many more considerations.

Well, you see how complex this is.

If you think about it though, the core problem with this sixth mass extinction is human interference.

Pleistocene rewilding is based on good intentions, but you know, it probably would just be more of the same thing.