Pleistocene Park: Past & Future of the Mammoth Steppe

For the last twenty years Nikita and his father, Sergey Zimov, have been building Pleistocene Park, a landscape scale scientific experiment and proof of concept, which aims to demonstrate that returning large animals to the Arctic can resurrect the vanished ‘Mammoth Steppe’ ecosystem and prevent permafrost from melting. Over the years they have populated Pleistocene Park with cold-adapted horses, reindeer, muskoxen, moose, yaks, and wizent (European bison). Last summer Harvard geneticist George Church visited the park and promised the Zimovs his first born woolly mammoth when he successfully clones one.