Have you ever seen a tuatara?

They don鈥檛 look like much. Pretty much like lizards. Wedge-shaped heads, big eyes, sprawled legs. They have low spines running down their backs, and fat, broad tails.

They鈥檙e not lizards. They鈥檙e reptiles, sure, but they split from lizards and snakes around 200 million years ago. They鈥檙e members of a tiny little family of critters that just kept trucking along through extinction event after extinction event. By the modern era, they only lived in New Zealand.

They鈥檙e weird. They have spinal bones shaped like a fish鈥檚 vertebrae. They have a well-developed third eye on the top of their head just after they鈥檙e hatched. They have no true teeth 鈥� just sharp jutting extensions of their jawbones, that are worn down and not replaced, so that an old tuatara is a toothless tuatara.

Tuatara are pretty neat.

We discovered them, then promptly almost wiped them out.

(This is a sentence that you can save and re-use for a wide variety of animals, plants, environments, cultures, etc.)

Today there are thousands of tuatara, but they only exist on small, isolated islands off the coasts. Specifically, they only live on islands not invaded by rats and dogs.

Even before humans developed an industrial civilization, we were destructive. We like to talk about 鈥渋nvasive鈥� species as if they just happened to show up, but they鈥檙e really 鈥渋ntroduced鈥� species. We traveled the world in dugout canoes and triremes and tall ships, and everywhere we went we took rats and starlings and zebra mussels and pigs and dogs and rabbits and foxes.

Humans are special. We are destruction and wisdom in a single package, and there鈥檚 not one sainted soul among us who can separate the two strands.

Humans are special. We鈥檙e the only disaster that can see itself coming. We鈥檙e a tornado that knows the difference between the snapping of fenceposts and the snapping of limbs.

Humans are special. We can halt our downhill rush towards destruction.

Perhaps.

The tuatara lives, despite the rats and dogs and the humans, all of whom will happily eat a fat-tailed lizard-looking thing if they鈥檙e hungry.

But for how long? Human society is inherently unstable. There has never been a year in recorded history that a war was not taking place somewhere. How long before we bust things up good, and we鈥檙e back to sitting on little islands, hungry and looking for a meal.

We might pull back out of that future tailspin, right our course. But will the tuatara be there, when we do?