The classic story of predator control, deer population explosion, and habitat degradation on the Kaibab Plateau was a cornerstone of population ecology and natural resources through the 1960s. The story has almost disappeared from natural resources, following several papers in the 1970s that questioned the quality of the evidence and the truth of the overall story. We reexamined the classic story from the viewpoint of habitat impacts of large deer populations; if the story were true, aspen regeneration should have been severely reduced in the 1920s. We also evaluated other lines of evidence, including the secondary irruption of the deer population in the 1950s
