Yakutia Wilderness

The Yakutia Wilderness is envisioned to be located along the East Siberian Coast and upon the off shore islands. As shown below, it would stretch east from beyond the Lena River Delta almost to the Kalyma River - approximately 1500 kilometers. The included landscape is primarily mossy tundra, rising into mountains to the south.

This wilderness is visualized as a home for a wide assortment of megafauna that can thrive in an arctic environment - similar to the Pleistocene Park envisioned by Sergey A. Zimov and described in a 2005 Science article. Beside wildlife currently extant in these lands, the wilderness would include representatives of pleistocene fauna found elsewhere as well as recreations of extinct megafauna such as the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinocerous.

Most symbolic of these now extinct animals is the Woolly Mammoth, dwarf representa- tives of which survived the Pleistocene on Wrangel Island for thousands of years after the Pleistocene era ended.

The Pleistocene Megafauna Chart presents some of these Pleistocene species that may have inhabited the area of the proposed Yakutia Wilderness. Those species with a gray background are extinct.

The table below lists wildlife inhabitants proposed to act as stand-ins for Pleistocene creatures that are now extinct.

Extinct Pleistocene Arctic Megafauna & Proposed Stand-ins
Extinct	Stand-in
Cave Lion	Siberian Tiger (Panthera tigris altaica)
Woolly Mammoth	Genetically modified African or Asian elephant to increase bodily hair and other characteristic beneficial in a colder climate.
Pleistocene Horse	Yakut Horse (Equus caballus)
Wooly Rhino	Genetically altered Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensi) or White/Black Rhinocerous
Steppe Bison	Wood Bison (Bison bison athabascae)

The return of the Pleistocene megafauna presages the renewal of the tundra steppe, the grasslands associated with and maintained by these great creatures. Without such renewal, the carbon now sequestered in the soils of the mammoth ecosystem could end up as greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by rising temperatures, surpassing the total carbon content of all the planet's rain forests. Restored Pleistocene grasslands could stabilize the soil and prevent permafrost from melting.

The feeding habits of the megafauna could also prevent the growth of shrubs in the tundra and the movement of the boreal forest further north. Widespread shrub and tree expansion, by absorbing more of the sun's heat, could further magnify atmospheric heating over Arctic lands by a factor of 2 to 7.

Natural corridors would connect this great wilderness to tundra to the west and east and to the boreal forest to the south.

Recreation of hairy Pleistocene species is not the fantasy that many people might imagine. As pointed out by Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale, p. 67, Hairiness is one of those characteristics that can increase or decrease in evolution again and again. Vestigial hairs, with their associated cellular support structures, lurk in even the barest-seeming skin, ready to evolve into a full coat of thick hair at short notice... Look at the woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses that rapidly evolved in response to the recent ice ages in Eurasia.

Some Pleistocene Megafauna Inhabitants of Siberia
Cave Lion (Panthera leo spelaea)	The cave lion, also known as the European or Eurasian cave lion, is an extinct feline known from fossils and a wide variety of prehistoric art. It is the largest cat that ever existed, and was about 25% larger than the modern African lion.
Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx)	Inhabits forested area.
Gray Wolf (Canus lupis)	This is the same wolf who wandered the tundra during the Pleistocene
Brown Bear (Ursus arctos)	Same bear as the American grizzly. Prefers forested areas, but is found in the tundra ecosystem.
Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)	The polar bear is the largest terrestrial carnivore. Adult males can measure 3 meters in length. The polar bear's coat, covering it completely except for the nose and foot pads, is superbly adapted to Arctic environments.
Woolly Mammoth (mammut americanum)	Mammoths first appeared in Africa about four million years ago, then migrated north and dispersed widely across Europe and Asia. At first a fairly generalized elephant species, mammoths evolved into several specialized species adapted to their environments. Mammoths stood about 11 feet (3.4 meters) tall at the shoulder.
Pleistocene Horse (Equus lenaicus)	This horse existed before the last ice age, and its contemporaries were mammals like the mammoth, reindeer, and woolly rhinoceros. The horse took refuge and survived in areas of northeastern Siberia where only the mountains were covered in ice.
Wooly Rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis)	The Woolly Rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis) first appeared some 350,000 years ago and may have survived until as recently as 10,000 years ago. The wooly rhino (2 meters tall at the shoulder – 6 feet) was a member of the subfamily Dicerorhinae.
Saiga Antelope (Saiga tatarica)	Saiga antelopes, their bizarre-looking bulbous noses an adaptation to breathing cold dry air, were common in Pleistocene Siberia. They are now at the most threatened category in terms of possible extinction.
Steppe Bison (Bison priscus)	The Steppe Bison became extinct in the Late Pleistocene, as it was replaced in Europe by the Wisent and in America by the American Bison. Steppe Bison were over two metres high and probably resembled the American Bison. The tips of the horns were a metre apart.
Musk Oxen (Ovibos moschatus)	The musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) is an arctic mammal of the Bovidae family, noted for its thick coat and for the male's strong odor, hence the name. Both sexes have long curved horns. Musk oxen are 1.4 m high at the shoulder. The tundra muskox, one of the few large northern mammals to have survived to the present day, saw its genetic diversity decrease greatly at the end of the Pleistocene period, around 10,000 years ago.
Yak (Bos mutos)	Fossil remains of the domestic yak and its wild ancestor date back to the Pleistocene period. Wild yaks (Bos mutus) stand about two meters tall at the shoulder.
Caribou or Raindeer (Rangifer tarandus.)	Caribou is a Pleistocene species adapted to cold dry temperatures. The various subspecies of caribou display a wide range of size. Generally speaking, the subspecies inhabiting the more southerly latitudes are larger than their northern cousins. Caribou can have shoulder heights of up to 1.2 meters.
Moose or European Elk (Alces alces)	The moose or european elk is the largest member of the deer family Cervidae, distinguished from other members of Cervidae by the form of the palmate antlers of its males. In the Yakutia Wilderness the moose will normally be found in the Taiga (boreal forest) rather than the tundra.