America’s Forgotten Megafauna, the Indestructible Coyote, and the Ethics of De-Extinction
By the Editorial Staff, Above Black Media
Long before the United States government spent more than half a billion dollars trying to eradicate a single species, North America was a continent almost unrecognizable to modern eyes — a Pleistocene landscape populated by camels, mammoths, short-faced bears, and dire wolves, all coexisting alongside the earliest confirmed human inhabitants of the continent. Understanding how that world collapsed, what survived, and what we are now attempting to resurrect tells us something profound not only about ecology, but about the relationship between scientific hubris and natural resilience. Historian and naturalist Dan Flores, whose body of work on the American West has positioned him as one of the most rigorous voices in the field, has spent decades reconstructing that story — and the coyote, of all creatures, sits at the center of it.
Flores’s central argument is deceptively simple: the coyote is the most persecuted large mammal in American history, and it won. Every instrument of industrial-scale extermination the federal government could devise — strychnine poisoning campaigns, steel traps, aerial gunning, bounty systems, and ultimately a dedicated agency, Wildlife Services, with an annual budget in the hundreds of millions — failed to reduce coyote populations by any meaningful or lasting measure. Today, Canis latrans has expanded its range from its original Great Plains heartland to every corner of North America, including dense urban centers like Chicago and New York City’s Central Park, and is actively pushing south toward the Darién Gap. The coyote did not merely survive the American extermination campaign; it thrived because of it.
The biological mechanism behind that resilience is well-documented and deeply counterintuitive. When coyote populations are reduced through culling, the survivors respond with increased litter sizes, earlier sexual maturity, and expanded territorial ranges. The very act of persecution triggers a compensatory reproductive surge. Wolves, by contrast, whose social hierarchies are rigid and whose pack structures are essential to successful breeding, collapsed under the same pressure. Remove the alpha pair and you fracture the pack. Remove a breeding female coyote and her sister fills the role by the following spring. It is a lesson in evolutionary strategy that wildlife managers spent the better part of a century refusing to absorb.
The coyote’s story, however, cannot be fully understood without situating it within the broader context of North America’s ecological history — a history that most Americans know almost nothing about. Flores draws attention to the White Sands fossil trackways in New Mexico, where human footprints dating to approximately 23,000 years ago were preserved in ancient lakebed sediment alongside the tracks of giant ground sloths and mammoths. These findings, published in peer-reviewed form beginning in 2021, pushed back the confirmed arrival of humans in the Americas by thousands of years and fundamentally disrupted the long-held Clovis-first model of continental habitation. The implications are significant: humans and North America’s megafauna coexisted for far longer than previously believed, which complicates simplistic human overkill hypotheses for the mass extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene.
That extinction event — which unfolded roughly between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago — eliminated nearly 80 percent of North America’s large mammal genera. Gone were the American mastodon, the Columbian mammoth, the American horse, the American camel, the giant ground sloth, the saber-toothed cat, and the dire wolf. What remained were the ecological ghosts of that vanished world: species whose bodies still carry behavioral and physiological adaptations calibrated for predators and competitors that no longer exist. The pronghorn antelope, capable of sustained speeds approaching 55 miles per hour, is the clearest example. Nothing alive in North America today can chase a pronghorn at full stride. The pronghorn is still running from the American cheetah, which has been extinct for ten millennia. Its speed is a memory encoded in living tissue.
The bison narrative intersects with these themes in equally sobering ways. Once numbering between 30 and 60 million animals across the Great Plains — forming the largest aggregation of large mammals recorded in the history of the post-Pleistocene world — the American bison was reduced to fewer than 1,000 individuals by the 1880s, the result of a deliberate industrial slaughter that was in many cases explicitly encouraged as a mechanism for destroying the subsistence base of Plains Indian nations. The recovery of the bison, now the official national mammal of the United States, is one of conservation’s rare genuine success stories, though the animal that roams managed reserves today exists in conditions almost nothing like the open-range ecology that shaped it.
Into this conversation comes one of the most ethically complex developments in contemporary biology: the announced revival of the dire wolf by de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences. In April 2025, Colossal announced that it had produced what it characterized as dire wolf pups through genetic editing of gray wolf DNA, targeting key loci associated with the dire wolf’s distinctive morphology — its heavier build, broader skull, and lighter coloration. The scientific community’s response was measured skepticism. Paleogeneticists noted that the dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, diverged from the gray wolf lineage approximately 5.7 million years ago, making it far more genetically distant from Canis lupus than, say, the woolly mammoth is from the Asian elephant. What Colossal has produced, critics argue, is a gray wolf with selected dire wolf traits — a functional proxy, not a genuine resurrection.