America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals. And that it seems enigmatic only because it is one of the few survivors of America’s Pleistocene extinctions, with behaviors strongly shaped by the vanished world to which it evolved.

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