Channel Islands

Declared in 1980, this archipelago off the coast of California is nicknamed "the Galápagos of North America" for its very high degree of evolutionary isolation: it holds the island fox, an endemic canid that in only a few thousand generations became one of the smallest canids in the world, and which came to the brink of extinction in the 1990s through golden eagles that had colonised the islands, until an ambitious conservation programme — including relocating the eagles and reintroducing the bald eagle — brought it back, in what is reckoned one of the greatest species recoveries in American history. On Santa Rosa, the oldest human remains in North America have been found, at some 13,000 years old.