To save the elephant, first understand the mastodon.

Great beasts like elephants, lions and grizzly bears are threatened worldwide.  New research on the demise of Ice Age giants like the mastodon and saber toothed cat now offers vital insights for modern conservation.

"Scientists have long debated whether prehistoric people drove large Ice Age animals to extinction," explains Sharon Levy, a veteran science journalist who covers biology and conservation for OnEarth, New Scientist, BioScience, and other magazines.  "Delving into the private lives of these long-gone giants, researchers are finding strong parallels between their fate and the plight of modern wildlife."

Levy's new book, Once and Future Giants: what Ice Age extinctions tell us about the fate of Earth's largest animals, explores relationships between people and big wild animals, past and present.

• Evidence from ancient mammoth and mastodon tusks suggests the last of these animals suffered from intense hunting pressure, just as modern elephants now do in Asia and Africa. 

• Some scientists now advocate "Pleistocene rewilding"-for example, bringing African elephants to the Great Plains of North America as ecological stand-ins for the extinct mammoth and mastodon.  Others fear this radical proposal will endanger such conservation successes as the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

        

• Some cases of unplanned Pleistocene rewilding-like the return of the wild horse to the West thousands of years after its native ancestors died out-have become serious ecological problems.  Other instances of unplanned rewilding, like the 4,000-year-old introduction of the dingo to Australia, now work to protect imperiled ecosystems.

• Man-made greenhouse gases are producing a heat wave more rapid and extreme than any in mammalian history.  Modern wildlife face an intensified version of the threats that did in Ice Age giants: intense warming combined with the impacts of a burgeoning human population.

        

• Healthy populations of megafauna can actually help stop the hemorrhage of greenhouse gases and buffer the impacts of climate change.

• Domesticated creatures like cattle are descended from larger, now-vanished Ice Age ancestors.   It's possible to manage them in ways that will help restore wild habitats.

Once and Future Giants will intrigue and enlighten anyone with an interest in our relationship to the wild.  The book is written in an accessible, engaging style, and explores the human quirks and passions behind the scientific debate. 

Oxford University Press, February 2011, Hardback, 272 pages, $24.95.
CONTACT:  Sharon Levy, 707/822-3077, sharon@sharonlevy.net; or Justyna Zajac, Associate Publicist, 212/743-8337,  justyna.zajac@oup.com