AHC: Save an extinct species.
- Thread starter Duke Andrew of Dank
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- extinction species
I'm a paleontologist in training and extinct animals buff, I'd love to advise you if/when you try again or with another species.
Good ones include:
--Ivory-billed woodpecker (or Imperial if you want to set it in Mexico)
--Sea mink
--Huia and piopio (in New Zealand)
--Dusicyon avus (mainland ancestor of the Falklands fox; known to have associated with humans, could have been domesticated alongside or instead of Canis dogs)
--Desert Rat-Kangaroo (if you want to write Aussie accents and involve the late, great Steve Irwin)
Passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet were super social and thus hard to imagine surviving in relict populations.
I have a rough outline for a timeline where the National Parks movement gets started a century and a bit earlier in the UK. Part of that sees a small herd of Białowieża wisent sent over as a gift from Russia - pretty much inconsequential at first, until after WW1 when the British wisent herd gives the species a much broader genetic base.
I'd like relict Allotherians in Australia, S. America, or best of all, Antarctica.
I think the dodo would be the easiest species to save from extinction. I mean he didn't even taste that good. Sailors would eat everything else before eating a dodo. Before the name 'dodo' became universal, it's Dutch name was 'walgvogel', gagging bird. It's misfortune was that it only bread on ONE island and that that islan just happened to lie smak on the East India trading route. Saving the dodo would be as simple as having a second colony on a nearby island NOT on the main Indian thoroughfare. Or just moving it's island, birds and all a 100 miles to the North.... At least until the general public becomes aware of the bird and starts to take a liking to it.
This doesn't really have much to do with what is being currently discussed, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what human history would have looked like if we still had animals like wild horses, lions and mammoths roaming all over Siberia, Europe and North America while there were similar analogues in South America and the like.
Nope. There were 3-4 distinct waves of immigration to North America. Stopping 1 might be possible. All of them,!?! With wide open empty land available? Nope. Not gonna happen.
The only dwarf elephants I know of were island endemics. Which doesn't give them a lot of genetic variability.
Also. No elephant has ever been domesticated, so good luck on doing it with this one.
You seem to be very confused as to what a species is. LOTS of organisms breed semi regularly with close relatives. As long as the gene flow doesn't cause the populations to merge, they're still valid species.
So, no, Neanderthal s are extinct despite having marginally contributed to your ancestry and mine.
Already mentioned. Multiple times I think.
Overall, if we dismiss the most outlandish proposals like the direwolf, mammoth or saber-tooth tiger, many species only became extinct in the 1800's. So lots of them could be saved if environmentalism would have taken off 100 years earlier. Perhaps if the idea of the 'English Garden' that involved a 'curated' natural look would also include looking at the ecosystem and interconnectedness of Flora and fauna. Imagine not only the US but also most European powers had a national park system in place by the end of the Napoleonic wars... Not only in their own countries but also in their colonies.
However this would require a complete change of mindset on behalf of not only the general populus but foremost the scientific community. I mean at that time most explorers still described any species they encountered in terms of their taste and how much sport it was to hunt them. May be just have an ASB put 500 items of each species in suspended animation stacked away on Skull Island would be the simplest solution after all.
However this would require a complete change of mindset on behalf of not only the general populus but foremost the scientific community. I mean at that time most explorers still described any species they encountered in terms of their taste and how much sport it was to hunt them. May be just have an ASB put 500 items of each species in suspended animation stacked away on Skull Island would be the simplest solution after all.
And... you seem to be quite confused as regarding the usage of "sarcasm", and "tongue-in-cheek"
It's not your fault; I'm an acquired flavor.
Bavarian Raven
Banned
to be fair, there is at least a half a dozen equally valid defs of what a species is...
again, the reason the dodo died out was because of invasive species, not overhunting, and there wasn't really a conservation movement in the 17th century to save them