“None have been seen in eastern Georgia for many years.” “The exact range of the form cannot now be given, as the puma is extinct in the region directly northeast of Florida, and I believe northern Florida as well,” reported a member of the Boston Society of Natural History in 1898. The result was that by the end of the nineteenth century Puma concolor coryi, the sleek animals that had once roamed from the bottom of South Carolina to Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, had nearly vanished. Meanwhile, hunters, squatters, and sprawling agriculture wore down deer populations, the staple of the panther diet. Bounty laws awarded anyone who killed a panther and could prove it with a scalp in 1887 a dead panther was worth $5. Colonizers in this part of the country beginning with the Spanish conquerors saw the animals as a menace and killed them accordingly. The first camp believed the subspecies had completely disappeared. In the southeastern United States, pumas are called panthers, and in the early 1970s there were two camps among biologists when it came to the question of whether any were still living. Copyright © 2015.(Scientific American and Saint Martin’s Press are part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.) Excerpted with permission from Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things, by M.
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