Wild New World The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

In 1908, a cowboy discovered bones from an extinct giant bison near Folsom, New Mexico. When archeologists found handmade weapons embedded in the fossils, the discovery vastly expanded our continent’s known human history, but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens have presented to their fellow animals. Dan Flores’s ambitious new history tells the epic story of animals and humans in the “wild new world”—from the grand forces that shaped North American biology to Pleistocene mass extinctions; clashes between Euro-American belief systems and animals’ learned behaviors; and the precipitous decline and miraculous rescue of species in recent centuries. In thrilling narrative style, informed by native religions, cutting-edge science, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human characters who studied America’s animals, hastened their eradication, and are working to recover them. Eons in scope, and continental in scale, Wild New World is an intimate yet sweeping re-examination of animal-human relations.