If you wound back the universe's clock, just a little bit, just 10,000 years ago, a blink of an eye from the perspective of the cosmos, you would find yourself in a world full of bigger, hairier animals.

People don't seem to understand just how dang recent the last Ice Age was.

We've only just barely stepped out of it.

And before we darkened the doorway of a frozen planet, woolly megafauna dominated the world.

This was an environment where animals who weighed thousands of pounds and had enormous shaggy coats had an advantage over the animals who didn't.

I think the advantages of a woolen coat are obvious, it keeps you warm, but the size is advantageous too.

It's easier to keep a fat body warm, number one.

And number two, and this is maybe counterintuitive, bigger animals have less surface area

compared with their volume, meaning that larger animals proportionately have less of their

body exposed to the elements.

And so, on the Eurasian supercontinent and in North America, just a moment ago in the grand scheme of things, we had bigger, hairier versions of the animals you know today.

We had woolly mammoths. We had woolly rhinos. We had cave bears that stood 11.5 feet tall.

We had 20-foot-long sloths. And most of these animals, these Pleistocene

megafauna, went extinct. Some say it was the natural changes in climate that occurred over the

past millennia. Others argue that humans overhunted these animals. Both of these theories are

plausible. Both could be working in tandem. For our purposes,

it doesn't matter why these creatures died out, because today, we're going to talk about one who

didn't. Today, we're going to talk about a massive, woolly animal who may as well have stayed in the Ice Age.

Today, we're talking about the yak, Boss Grunions.

I'm Mackin. This is species.

Welcome to the show.

If you want to hear a rare, long-form interview with the president and founder of Pita, Ingrid Newkirk, we did that earlier this week.

...