The killers turn out to be bringers of life. One of the most striking findings of modern ecology is that ecosystems without large predators behave in completely different ways from those that retain them Some of them drive dynamic processes that resonate through the whole food chain, creating niches for hundreds of species that might otherwise struggle to survive. Above all, it means bringing back missing species. It involves letting trees return to places that have been denuded, allowing parts of the seabed to recover from trawling and dredging, permitting rivers to flow freely again. Rewilding means the mass restoration of damaged ecosystems. The lynx is now becoming the totemic animal of a movement that is transforming British environmentalism: rewilding. But even without this key feature, it's hard to see what else the creature could have been. Were it not for the animal's backside having worn away with time, we could have been certain, as the lynx's stubby tail is unmistakable. A 9th- century stone cross from the Isle of Eigg shows, alongside the deer, boar and aurochs pursued by a mounted hunter, a speckled cat with tasselled ears. However, this is not quite the last glimpse of the animal in British culture. If this is so, it would bring forward the tassel-eared cat's estimated extinction date by roughly 5,000 years. But the 2006 find, together with three others in Yorkshire and Scotland, is compelling evidence that the lynx and the mysterious llewyn were in fact one and the same animal. Until this discovery, the lynx - a large spotted cat with tassel led ears - was presumed to have died out in Britain at least 6,000 years ago, before the inhabitants of these islands took up farming. But what was it? Nothing seemed to fit, until 2006, when an animal bone, dating from around the same period, was found in the Kinsey Cave in northern England. It's time to start returning vanished native animals to Britain, says John Vesty There is a poem, written around 598 AD, which describes hunting a mystery animal called a llewyn.
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