An Australian biology professor is causing a rumble in the academic jungle by suggesting that his country should import elephants and other foreign species into its wild interior.
Rhinos and even giant Komodo dragon lizards could be imported, David Bowman suggests in an article in Nature.
He says Australia is just not managing its most pressing ecological problems, and something radical is needed.
But some fellow scientists say it is just a bad and dangerous idea.
Others, however, are supportive, seeing potential for helping beleaguered Aboriginal communities and reducing the risk of forest fires, as repairing some damaged ecology.
The problems Prof Bowman proposes solving with his radical zoological armoury stem from the huge changes wrought by the two waves of human arrival - the first by forebears of the Aborigines about 50,000 years ago, and the second by European settlers a few hundred years ago.
The first initiated the slow demise of the spectacular megafauna that once bestrode the giant continent.
They included the marsupial lion, a metre and a half long and a powerful predator; the diprotodon, a wombat bigger than a cow; giant birds such as the Dromornidae family that once boasted Stirton's Thunder Bird, three metres high; and crocodiles, lizards and turtles bigger than any still walking this Earth.
Take so many big species out of an ecosystem, and there are bound to be changes all the way down to its bottom.
If you throw in land clearance across enormous swathes of the continent and the subsequent introduction of rabbits, camels, cane toads, rats, pigs and everything else that came with the European settlers, you have an ecology in profound turmoil.
Attempts have been made to control rabbits, pigs, buffalo and lots of other alien species; but they haven't really worked.
"We have a very unbalanced ecology and it's all just spiralling into a trajectory," lamented Prof Bowman when I spoke to him earlier in the week.
"We're not managing actively, we're just managing bits of the problem - so it's a big mess."
So the root of his idea is that if you can't restore the animals themselves, bring in something that can fulfil a similar ecological role.
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