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It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation.

I'm not sure the Russians would be happy that their iconic wooly mammoth has North American origins.

The mammoth was basically done in by climate change. The last ones survived on Wrangel Island, north of Chukotka, until 3,700 years ago. According to Eveny mythology, mammoths scooped up dirt with their tusks to form the first dry land.

If we brought the mammoth back to Siberia, maybe that would be good for the ecosystems that are changing because of climate change.

A few dozen changes to the genome of a modern elephant - to give it subcutaneous fat, woolly hair and sebaceous glands - might suffice to create a variation that is functionally similar to the mammoth. Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming.

Most Europeans have no idea how wild life can be in north America.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.