This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

Gorangosa, which was a jewel of southern Africa,

had great populations of lions, elephants, hippos, buffalo, etc.

Absolutely decimated.

So if you went there in the early part of the last decade, in the early 2000s,

you might drive for five or six hours and see one

wardhog, one baboon, maybe.

Biologist Sean B. Carroll of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He spoke March 15th in the great hall of the Cooper Union here in New York City about his

latest book, The Seringeti Rules, the quest to discover how life works and why it matters.

Gorangosa National Park was ravaged during the Mozambique War for Independence from

Portugal and then the Civil War that followed.

And a philanthropist, Greg Carr,

was looking for a project to really sink his teeth into

and to work on human development,

became also really interested in conservation,

learned about Mozambique, and in 2004 committed sizable fortune to helping to restore Goringosa in partnership with the Mozambique government.

And in 2004, surveys showed there were fewer than 1,000 large animals in the entire park,

and this is a massive place.

So that's all antelope and elephants and all come by fewer than a

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