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The corner of what was once Avenue Rd. and Bloor St. is a rushing creek surrounded by a dense and vast forest, a blanket of riverbank grape and wavering reeds, and watched over carefully by a lone eastern cougar, perched majestically atop a crumbling north wall of the Royal Ontario Museum.

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500 years after the mysterious dissappearance of humanity, better apparently. I guess one weekend everyone decided to just stay at the cottage or something.

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All of this was presaged in a book called The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, an author and professor of international journalism at the University of Arizona.

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Originally posted by marzo:
The buildings of concrete, metal, and brick would last for a very long time and they would become dens for animals. Rosedale mansions and suburban bungalows would become homes for bears, big cats, and non-native animals escaping from captivity. If kangaroos and elephants moved out of the zoo, thrived and multiplied, they could form an established community. Kangaroos leaping along the Don Valley Parkway, rhinoceros grazing on the lawns of Forest Hill, elephants feasting on abandoned fields and orchards as they march outwards to the green belts, all of them turning the ecosystem upside-down.
If the Detroit-Windsor and Ft.Erie-Buffalo bridges hold together the animals could move back and forth, elephants from Ontario zoos and circuses mating and joining up with elephants from Tennesee.
As global warming continues, apes and monkeys may find shelter in the abandoned buildings and may adapt and survive in the harsh climate.
Anything could happen.

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There's a chance, if global warming outlives the human species in this scenario, that one might also see green alligators, probably feeding on our ubiquitous long necked geese. Being hardy creatures, we might also expect, not many, but some humpty backed camels. And some chimpanzees. Together with less exotic species like cats and rats and the above mentioned elephants.