Extinction's Effect on Childhood Toys Tucson CHRISTMAS was when they sent in the reinforcements. By then the regular troops were weary, though still stalwart, still brave. Some had lost limbs, others an eyeball. The soles of one guy's feet kept peeling off. He was my favorite: a hippo. My mother patched his pads many times. Every year the green recruits arrived, protruding from stockings or sprawled beneath the tree. Not only stuffed animals, but plastic and wooden animal figurines; books about animals, from stories to alphabets to encyclopedias; games and movies with animal heroes; clothing covered with images of animals. Sure, there were dogs, cats and bunnies in our youthful menagerie; there were the animals of the barnyard, chickens and horses and pigs. But the wild ones, the ones my siblings and I only ever saw in zoos or photographs or on the screen - these were the ones we loved best. How fierce, how strange! They had claws or shells or impossibly long necks; they had spotted fur, manes like halos. They had soft pouches to carry their babies in. Tigers, bears, lions, elephants, monkeys, turtles, dolphins, koalas, giraffes: in those days, everything was animals. They made up the fiery pantheon of our imagination; through animals we explored the world. They were our army of play. Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination and art. And parents have long recognized this. We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness. Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human - which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race's distinguishing characteristics - children must be surrounded by animal imagery. True: when those children grow up, they no longer speak so often of their love for animals. As adults we deny or compartmentalize that fondness; we're taught to privilege the love of our own kind above all others, and most of us accept that teaching. Yet we have not forgotten the friends of our youth. Just open a magazine, look at a list of sports teams, at logos and billboards, at paintings and literature: the iconography of animals is quietly dominant. They're with us still, in our dreams, in our jokes, in our built landscapes, in the stories we tell to make meaning of our lives. WHICH makes me wonder: What of the children of the future? When the polar bears and penguins are gone, the gorillas and elephants and coral-reef clown fish like Nemo - what diverse and lovable army will be their close companions? If the dinosaurs are any indication, there's a place in our pantheon for the extinct. My son has a blue plushy allosaurus he calls Spot-Spot, with whom he often sleeps. Once, anxious about the sharp teeth on a T-Rex he'd seen in a picture book, he asked me whether he would ever meet a dinosaur. I said: No, darling. Dinosaurs last roamed the earth some 65 million years ago. People have never met the dinosaurs; we've only found their bones. A future mother will most likely say, when asked if her child will meet a polar bear: No, dear. The polar bears lived a long time ago, when ice still floated on the Arctic seas. The last elephants trumpeted out their calls in Africa and India before you were even born. You have nothing to fear from a prowling lioness. The army fell, she may think to herself. In the end, there were no more reinforcements to send. Will Barbies and robots be enough for those future children? The hybrid monsters of fantasy video games, the fossil-based reconstructions? Maybe a few stray wild animals that were once our partners in this grandiose place will live on as collective memories, the bygone stars of screen and storybook, but they, too, must fade from the stores and eventually the pixels as time marches on. Lydia Millet is the author of the novel "Magnificence."