As of this writing (December 2009), fewer than four hundred tigers may remain in the Russian Far East. Elsewhere in Asia, tiger populations continue to slip as well. If the tiger is permitted to go extinct in the wild, it would be the largest carnivore to do so since the American lion (Panthera leo atrox) died out at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately ten thousand years ago. The extinction of the American lion happened to coincide with the dawn of our current era, which some scientists have taken to calling the Anthropocene. It is characterized by increasingly dense concentrations of
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