Paleocene - In the Geologic Time Scale, the Paleocene is the first period of the Cenozoic, (Age of Mammals, 65 million years ago to the present). Although primitive mammals existed throughout the time of the dinosaurs, their numbers and varieties exploded during the Paleocene. The earliest identifiable ancestors of modern carnivores have been found in Paleocene sediments. Tigers as we know them appeared in the late Pliocene (5 to 1.8 million years ago) and thrived during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 40,000 years ago). In historical times their numbers began to be decimated as human population levels exploded.

Paleocene Park is a proposed preserve designed to genetically manage a viable tiger population in pristine habitats.  These two renditions were done by my good friend Ricardo Garces of Portugal.

I would like you to understand, from my perspective, why this facility must be developed.  The efforts to save the tiger in the wild are failing.  I have authored several papers on this subject.  If we do not establish a preserve where the tiger can be protected and expertly managed while there remains a viable gene pool from which to select unrelated founding pairs the species may be lost forever.  The Frozen Ark project may offer some hope of bringing the tiger back at some point in time, but at this juncture we cannot be certain.  Live tigers are still with us.  Let's try to make certain they stay with us.

If we can keep these great predators alive until the desire for tiger bone and other body parts no longer drives that poaching industry and the human populations in the range states can be brought under control, it is possible the tiger may be reintroduced into it's original, wild habitats if the governments and the people agree to provide the required land and prey resources.  A change in thinking of that magnitude could take hundreds of years.  Given the direction things are going now, I don't envision much hope for the tiger's survival in the wild.

I have purposely not gone into lengthy detail about Paleocene Park.  Suffice it to say, it would be an extremely costly venture.  Please red my Updates page for an explanation.