But the menagerie lives on in evolutionary ghosts. In North America, the fleet-footed pronghorns of the American West run laughably faster than any of their existing predators. But then, their speed isn’t meant for existing predators. It might be a vestige of their need to escape constant, harrowing pursuits by American cheetahs - until a geological moment ago. The absence was palpable to me as I rode a train past New Mexico’s Kiowa National Grassland,an American Serengeti, windswept and empty except for a lone wandering pronghorn still running from ghosts.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (56%)