I'm John Batchew with Professor Dan Flores, whose new book, Wild New World, tells the epic story of animals and people in America.

First contact from European diary keepers and chronologies that are important here, 16th, 17th century.

And what I learn is that the Europeans were amazed, flabbergasted at the range of animals

they had no comparable name for or had never experienced.

This was the Eurasian people who came 13,000 years ago, but in those 13,000 year differences,

there had been major changes in Europe and in North America for the biosphere that they're now entering.

And at first, Dan, there are quotes, one young man named Wood, he's amazed, he's overwhelmed. He sees this as awe,

with awe. Does that go away quickly or does that remain into the 18th century, that awe of the scale of

wildlife? It remains through a great deal of American history, in part because Europeans bring with them a knowledge of the old world that goes back to the Greeks and Romans, and in some cases even farther.

They have what's called a great chain of being that enumerates and illustrates all the creatures that you know as a European,

but they have no conception that there are other grand continents across the oceans.

And when they arrive in the Americas and then begin confronting thousands of

new birds, new mammals, new reptiles, new plants that they have no idea about, they are

frankly flabbergasted. And they're flabbergasted, in particular, after the great dying, we call it, when old world diseases

kill as many as 80, 85 percent of native people in the Americas, and all of this preserve biology

begins to undergo a kind of an ecological release,

Europeans are simply stunned at the abundance of creatures that are available in the America.

So it's a wholehearted kind of confronting the wonder of the Americas for the first time.

And I go to some links to describe how naturalists in particular

conveyed that diversity to us with their writings and their illustrations of it.

One of the subplots in Dan's book is the wolves, and I follow it carefully because I

learn in this part of the story, 16th, 17th century, the old world, there's the second

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