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American Serengeti by Dan Flores - 2016.
But of course it wasn't just dinosaurs they were finding. Up and down the plains, from West Texas to the Canadian border and beyond, the paleontologists excavated boxcars of fossil materials pointing to other giants that had lived much more recently than 65-plus million years ago. As nineteenth-and-twentieth-century scientists began to recreate the world of the Late Pleistocene, they invented a term - "charismatic megafauna" - to characterize a suite of African-like animals whose bones they were unearthing. It turned out that the American Serengeti had possessed lions ( Panthera, the giant steppe lion ), elephants in the form of mammoths, cheetah-like cats related to modern cougars, along with saber-toothed and scimitar cats that preyed on mammoth calves, giant ground sloths, and probably huge, long-horned bison. Skeletal material showed what was a remarkably gracile short-faced bear that ambushed almost every prey speicies. The American Serengeti had hyenas, a fast, hunting version, and giant wolves called dire wolves, which pulled down distinctively American-evolved prey from bands of camels and the incredibly plentiful herds of wild horses. That American bestiary was the closest analogue of the creatures of the African Plains and veldt anywhere in the world. Teddy Roosevelt is supposed to have said of his train ride out of Nairobi in 1910 that it was a "railroad through the Pleistocene."
Because while the African grasslands had retained most of their charismatic megafauna, North America did not, or at least not all. The most high-drama extinction scenario in North American history since we humans have been here happened not during the lifetime of the United States, but instead between 8,000 and 14,000 years ago, when more than thirty genera of American Pleistocene animals completely vanished. There were survivors, to be sure, and across the next few thousand years evolution replaced that earlier version of the American Serengeti with a new one, the historic version that Lewis and Clark, Audubon, and many others left descriptions of from the 1530s on. Until we destroyed it, there was this other, historic version of the Serengeti on the plains, the poetry and spectacle of thronging bison playing the role of thronging wildebeests, pronghorns assuming the role of antelopes and gazelles, stallion bands of wild horses functioning ecologically much like wild bands of zebras, gray and red wolves filling the niche of wild dogs, and coyotes doing an almost exact impression of jackals. Africa might have retained its lions and elephants, hyenas and cheetahs, but the post-Pleistocene version of the American Serengeti had another king of beasts, the grizzly. which played a god-like, lion-like role on the prairies.
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