Zookeeper Time Machine

As it gets colder, COVIDier (that's a new word, I've decided), and all around more miserable out there, I've been enjoying the simple pleasure of coming home after work and settling in with a good book before bed.  While I always enjoy animal books and natural histories, I prefer historical fiction and science fiction as my relaxation reading, and lately I've been picking my way through a series by British author Jodi Taylor which combines the two.  It's called The Chronicles of St. Mary's, and details the adventures of academic historians who, unbeknownst to most the world, possess technology that allows them to travel back in time.  They nip up and down the timeline studying major historical events directly, and usually almost getting themselves killed in the process.

About two books into the series, I decided that what they really needed was a zoologist to accompany them as well.

While normally focused on the battles and politics of the ancient world, from Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the middle ages (after that is just too modern for them to be bothered, usually), the protagonists do make occasional forays further back... way further back.  They've been to the Cretaceous to film dinosaurs and to the Ice Age to witness a mammoth hunt.  They even make a brief foray to 1660's Mauritius to encounter dodos and maybe salvage a few birds before they go extinct.

It was probably that idea that put in into my head how fun it would be to be a zookeeper with a time machine.  

Obviously, to start off with you could see all of the extinct animals and learn so much more about them - like did Tyrannosaurus have feathers or not? - or just enjoy the spectacle of, say, millions of passenger pigeons blotting out the sun for hours at a time.  Or, you could go back and see historical figures in action.  Imagine crouching behind a boulder and watching a young Charles Darwin pluck up marine iguanas, lob them into the ocean, and watch them swim back to his feet for another go-around.  There would be clear conservation potential as well.  The Sumatran rhino and the kakapo are almost extinct with tiny population sizes?  Imagine if it was possible to race back in time, collect a few animals that might have otherwise died without breeding (or at least take sperm samples) and bring them back to the present to boost genetic diversity.  Maybe, like Taylor's heroes, we could even re-wild some areas with once-extinct species.

One out of the box idea I had (well, not out of the box for me) would be to go to the zoo.  Not just any zoo, though.

When I read about Hernan Cortez and his men visiting the Aztec zoo at Tenochtitlan, with all of the amazing animals never seen before by European eyes, a thought occurred to me.  Zoos, by their nature, tend to be biased towards the rarest and most unusual of animals.  Suppose in that Aztec zoo there was a species that is no longer with us - maybe it was already very rare at the time of the conquest, making its inclusion in Montezuma's collection all the more prestigious for the Emperor.  It might have even been the last of its kind, and lost when the Spanish destroyed the city.  Or something similar in many of the far-flung zoos and menageries of the ancient world.  The Spanish chroniclers might not have noted it - everything was new and different to them, so how were they to know which species might never be seen again?

Forget about whether or not there really was a Trojan Horse, or whether Alfred the Great did or did not burn some cakes one winter's night... these are the questions we should really be investigating.  Now, if Ms. Taylor would just let me know when they're hiring at St. Mary's...