The Basement: Dan Flores | Camels in America, Ice Age Giants, and Coyote Resilience

Throughout the early 20th century, the U.S. government funded massive predator eradication programs using strychnine and later poisons to eliminate wolves and coyotes on behalf of livestock ranchers. Biologists Olaus and Adolph Murie were tasked in the 1930s with studying coyote predation to justify these extermination policies, but their comprehensive field research instead proved that predators maintained healthy wildlife populations primarily by preying on rodents and weak animals. Despite these scientific findings, government agencies ignored the data and continued poisoning millions of animals until public policy shifted decades later.

Coyotes survived extensive federal poisoning and hunting campaigns due to an evolutionary adaptation known as "fish-infusion," where harassment causes pack structures to break down into singles and pairs. Rather than declining, exploited populations respond by producing larger litters with higher puppy survival rates, allowing them to rapidly colonize new territory across North America. Historical government extermination attempts ultimately failed to eradicate coyotes while driving their expansion eastward.

Fossilized footprints discovered at White Sands, New Mexico, date human presence in North America back approximately 23,000 years, predating the traditional Clovis migration timeline. Footprint analysis reveals a teenage girl carrying a toddler interacting with regional megafauna, including a ground sloth that reared up in alarm upon sensing her presence. This evidence indicates humans inhabited the continent during the height of the last ice age, implying they likely arrived via maritime coastal routes rather than an ice-free land corridor.

North American pronghorns can reach speeds up to 65 miles per hour, far exceeding the top speed of any surviving modern predator like coyotes or wolves. Biologists explain this extreme adaptation as an evolutionary ghost of the Pleistocene epoch, when pronghorns needed to outrun fast-hunting American cheetahs and running hyenas. They retained these physiological traits—such as massive nostrils and exceptional stamina—for over 10,000 years despite the extinction of their historical predators.

President Thomas Jefferson organized a major southern counterpart to the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806, led by surveyor Thomas Freeman and naturalist Peter Custis with double the congressional funding. Tasked with exploring and mapping the Red River toward its supposed source near Santa Fe, the 55-member party was ultimately intercepted and turned back by over 200 armed Spanish troops at the modern Texas-Oklahoma border. Because the mission retreated without reaching its destination, it was largely omitted from American historical memory compared to the triumphant Lewis and Clark journey.

Biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences successfully produced direwolf puppies by extracting viable DNA from 13,000-year-old and 73,000-year-old museum fossil skulls. Researchers identified 28 distinct alleles unique to direwolves that were absent from modern greywolves and used CRISPR technology to integrate them into greywolf genomes. While these engineered animals match the physical morphology and white coat color of historical direwolves, scientists note they lack the learned pack culture and natural generational upbringing of wild animals.