Pleistocene Park

Ideas often sound alot crazier when you hear them from somebody else. Last year, when I was working at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs SD, I thought it'd be great if someone would create a Pleistocene Park (same idea as Jurassic Park, only Mammoths and American Lions instead of Sauropods and Tyrannosaurs). Apparently Paul Martin (quaternary paleontologist not prime minister) came up with this idea about 20 years ago, and a group of conservation biologists proposed the same idea in Nature just recently. There are a few important differences and similarities between my idea and theirs. First, their idea doesn't require anybody to clone anything; they just take close relatives of pleistocene megafauna (asian elephant to replace mammoth, African lion to replace American lion, llama to replace Paleollama) and set them up in a park somewhere in the American Mid-west. Second, somebody will actually take their idea seriously as a way to conserve endangered species. Third, neither their idea or mine is very good. We have a hard time preserving the natural fauna of North America, let alone species from widely differing habitats around the world, that aren't used to each other. A few North American Pleistocene remnants include wolves (extinct in the U.S. until their recent re-introduction from Canada), bears (range dramatically reduced in the last 100 years), Mountain Lions (nearly extinct), Bison (only rebounding on farms and a few national parks and forests), house hippos (rarely seen and presumed endangered) and pronghorns (rare). The problem with introducing asian elephants (or even African ones) is that they are not cold adapted. That's pretty much the reason that mamoths and mastadons made it into the Americas while their cousins remained in the old world. Not only that, but so surpisingly little is known about elephant physiology that they do abysmally and die young in zoos and parks. Furthermore, much of what these conservation biologists are suggesting has already been done. Its called a wild animal park! People drive around in a tram or their own vehicle, thought a park like setting and gawk at the transplanted African wild life!