THE WORLD HAS SUFFERED COUNTLESS extinction events in its three and half billion years of organic life. In what is known as the Younger Dryas era (circa. 12,900 to 11,700 years ago), woolly mammoths roamed the plains and comfortable tundra on most of the continents until an estimated half-mile wide meteor slammed into the upper glacial sheet covering modern-day Greenland—nearly ending the human race along with thousands of other species.                               

All in all, estimates place the total casualties around ten billion organisms wiped from the food chain, causing a devastating domino effect that took four millenia to correct, through both natural and human intervention. One such casualty included the bulk of woolly mammoths grazing on the land of North America and upper Eurasia. Thousands were killed almost instantly from intense heat and the resulting tsunamis, wind storms, and blotting out of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere for years at a time. The survivors did what survivors do, forage what they can, hide, resume the next hellish day. Eventually, the woolly mammoth was no more, with the last remnants hidden away on an island on the coast of the Chuckchi Sea in Russian— Wrangel Island. Eventually, these last members of the species dwindled to extinction around five hundred years before the present day.

The mammoths were gone.                                        

But Dr. Teresa Milby had a grand plan.