Journal of Mammalogy

No, we shouldn't.

A massive 2025 study published in the Journal of Mammalogy noted that over 1,500 brand-new, distinct mammal species have been recorded and classified in just the last 20 years.

That is a staggering rate of discovery for recent biological classification, especially considering we often assume the large terrestrial world is fully mapped.

And the statistics get even wilder.

He saw it as early as the 1940s, for certain, and he realized that what we were trying to do to manage wildlife, how we were treating wildlife in America, was based on these folk traditions that people had brought from the Old World.

As he said in a review of the Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman book, North American Wolves, that came out in the early 1940s, Leopold reviewed that book for The Journal of Mammalogy, and he said, "These guys aren't really doing science about the relationship between wolves, wild animals, and even stock.

They're just relying on this kind of handed-down folk tradition." And it's not modern scientific management, particularly in a world, as I mentioned in my introduction, where the United States has created a vast public land system that's nothing like any European nation has.

So what Leopold saw in the early 1940s was that we had had a chance to do something different.