Everything you need to understand or teach There Is a Wolf in My Time Machine by Larry Niven.
Hanville Svetz is a wanderer through time, usually very lost without knowing it.
His job is to ride a time machine, an "extension cage," back to the pre-Atomic era and retrieve extinct animals for display. Eleven hundred years after the Atomic era, little is known about animals. Humanity has so polluted the world that only humans and dogs, both of whom have adapted their lungs and digestions to the pollution, survive. When sent...