The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

September 7, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

Dan Flores spent forty years writing biographies of North America's wild animals—coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves—animals that cannot sue him for defamation, as he puts it. A historian of the American West, Flores began his career when a creative writing professor sent his student piece about crows and ravens to Sports Afield magazine, which published it for $300. "I think I can be a writer," Flores remembers telling his mother after that first sale. He was right.

The Coyote as Survivor and Trickster

Flores argues that the coyote is the most fascinating animal in North America, and the evidence goes back at least 10,000 years. During the Pleistocene extinctions, when woolly mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and ground sloths disappeared, the coyote—a small, jackal-sized wolf—survived. Native peoples noticed. They assigned the coyote an unusual role: a semi-deity called Coyote with a capital C, responsible for creating the topography of North America, making rivers flow, placing humans on the landscape, and battling monsters.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introducing Dan Flores and the War on Coyotes** - A historian of the American West joins the show to discuss his 40-year project writing the "biographies" of North American animals, focusing on the federal government's century-long attempt to eradicate the coyote.
2 (01:07) **Origin Story: From Baseball to Writing** - Dan describes his first published piece and the moment he realized he could be a professional writer.
3 (06:29) **The Encounter That Started It All** - At age 13, Dan uses a deer call to lure in a predator, sparking a lifelong fascination with wild canids.
4 (13:32) **Family History and a Spanish Surname in Louisiana** - Dan explains how his French-Louisiana family ended up with a Spanish last name, connecting it to a 300-year-old geopolitical romance.
5 (17:02) **The Room Above the Jean Cocteau Theater** - With no job offers after his PhD, Dan rented a room in Santa Fe above a movie theater that George R.R. Martin would later buy.
6 (26:12) **The Supernatural Coyote: Old Man America** - Dan argues the coyote is the most fascinating animal in North America because of its role as a "trickster" deity in Native American oral traditions.
7 (40:22) **What is a Coyote? The Canid Family Tree** - A breakdown of the genetic relationships between coyotes, gray wolves, red wolves, and the origin of the "coywolf."

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Show Notes

-Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -Head to https://superpower.com/basement for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested every year plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Dan Flores has spent his life chasing one animal: the one this country threw everything at and could not kill. Poison, bounties, half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, and today the coyote is in Central Park and closing in on South America. We get into wolves, mammoths, the footprints at White Sands, and the dire wolves Colossal brought back. Then Dan tells me about a chicken named Chickie. Stay for that one.