My brain woke me up at 3:30 this morning. I didn’t want to be awake. But it insisted. “You’d be better off as a pygmy mammoth,” it told me. “You know that?” it only pretended to ask.
As usual, my brain got it right.
Yes, pygmy mammoths went extinct about 13,000 years ago after having enjoyed unfettered free reign over the combined land mass of the Channel Islands when they were still one big island. In fact, these creatures — one-half the height of full-fledged mammoths, whose shoulders stood roughly 17 feet off the ground — existed no place else on the planet.