Nigel offered a humorous observation, "Quite the guardian for a school, wouldn't you agree? I suppose it beats having a grumpy old caretaker with a cat."
Nick's plan wasn't to go back far enough in time to prevent the extinction of these resources but rather to snatch an inconsequential sample of them that did not effect history at all and bring it back to the present. In this way history is entirely unaffected by his action and he gets to "revive" a whole garden of extinct resources to personally use. The best part though was that no one would know how he got these resources if he didn't explain himself. The ministry may try and get greedy and seek to confiscate them but by the time he can use this idea he will be practically untouchable already.-