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Topic: Giant ground sloth


  
  University of Florida News - UF Researchers Find Oldest Bones Of New Giant Ground Sloth Species
Eremotherium eomigrans, as named in a recent academic journal article, was the earliest of the giant sloths known as megatheres to have migrated from South America north across the Panamanian Land Bridge, Webb said.
While all other giant sloths had four fingers with only two or three claws, this one had five fingers, four of them with large claws, the biggest being nearly a foot long, he said.
A university geology student found the ground sloth bones in 1986 during a class field trip at the Haile limestone quarry west of Gainesville.
news.ufl.edu /2000/06/20/sloth   (707 words)

  
  Ground sloth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ground sloths are extinct edentate (Order Xenarthra) mammals that are believed to be relatives of tree sloths and three-toed sloths.
Concerning ground sloths' skeletal structure it may be concluded that ground sloths were very massive animals, plus, very thick bones that end in even thicker joints (especially those on hind legs) would give his appendages tremendous power, their size and fearsome claws, combined with this power, provided a formidable good defence against any predator.
Two ground sloths are among the animals that were trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Ground_sloth   (1050 words)

  
 * Sloth - (Animals): Definition
Tree sloths are five to seven species of slow-moving, leaf-eating, arboreal mammals of the family Bradypodidae and are found principally in the rain forests of Central and South America.
Sloths are plucked from the rain forest's canopy by Harpy eagles and other birds of prey.
Ground sloths were distant relatives of tree sloths that now live in the forests of South America.
en.mimi.hu /animals/sloth.html   (806 words)

  
 Sloth - MSN Encarta
Sloth, common name for certain slow-moving arboreal mammals that inhabit the tropical forests of South and Central America.
Sloths are divided into two groups: the three-toed sloths, among which is the ai, and the two-toed sloths, among which is the unau.
An ancestral form, the giant ground sloth, which lived in the western hemisphere more than 10,000 years ago, reached the size of an elephant.
encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761562271/Ai_(animal).html   (425 words)

  
 Giant Sloth Encyclopedia Article @ QuiltPlace.com (Quilt Place)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Unlike its living relative, the tree sloth, Megatherium was one of the largest mammals to walk the Earth.
This was a new species of giant sloth, which weighed nearly as much as an African bull elephant, more than 5 tons.
Sid the Sloth from Ice Age and Ice Age: The Meltdown is some species of giant sloth.
www.quiltplace.com /encyclopedia/Giant_sloth   (710 words)

  
 Search Tuna Report for Ground Sloth   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Aquatic Ground Sloth (was Re: Leedsichthys) Aquatic, at least semi-aquatic habits, are suggested by the taphonomy of the fossils: very abundant and complete skeletons occur in a typical marine assemblage, together with fish, crocodiles, birds (penguins) and dolphins: this assemblage was probably deposited in a beach environment, while the coast itself was a desert....
The UnMuseum - Giant Sloth Giant Sloth The giant ground sloth was one of the enormous creatures that thrived during the ice ages....
Giant Sloth The giant ground sloth was one of the enormous creatures that thrived during the ice ages....
www.searchtuna.com /ftlive/176.html   (5641 words)

  
 SDNHM Fossil Mysteries Field Guide: Giant ground sloth
Giant ground sloths have to be among the strangest mammals that ever walked on Earth.
Ground sloths were able to stand up on their hind legs, in order to reach the leaves and twigs they wanted to eat.
A strange anatomical feature of some ground sloths was the presence of dermal ossicles, or small nodules of bone, which formed in the skin, under the fur.
www.sdnhm.org /exhibits/mystery/fg_giantsloth.html   (907 words)

  
 SLOTH CLAWS
Giant sloths are among these creatures and giant ground sloth fossils are not only impressive to display but rare, as well.
Giant ground sloths were so large that they were not able to climb trees, hence their land-roving lifestyle.
Giant sloths are related to armadillos, sharing similar designs in their blunt, deep skulls as well as their mandibles.
www.paleodirect.com /lm13-010.htm   (788 words)

  
 [No title]
A century on and the adventure continues in hunt for the giant sloth Now, a century later, Prichard's great-grandson Charlie Jacoby is planning to retrace his ancestor's journey A hundred years ago Cyril Arthur Pearson decided to launch a new national newspaper - that paper was the Daily Express.
The largest of the ground sloths was megatherium - on its hind legs it stood 20ft tall and weighed up to four tons.
Their cousins, the tree sloths, still thrive and there is no scientific reason why their ground cousins should have become extinct: when North and South America were joined, the invasion of species from the north drove many southern species to extinction.
www.theshadowlands.net /sloth.txt   (1433 words)

  
 The San Bernardino County Museum
Ground sloths first arrived in North America about 9 million years ago and became extinct at the end of the Ice Age.
The fossil sloth was excavated by Museum volunteers as part of a joint effort between the Bureau of Land Management, Las Vegas District, and the Museum.
The sloth exhibit was funded by the County of San Bernardino and the San Bernardino County Museum Association.
www.sbcounty.gov /museum/exhibits/ground.htm   (423 words)

  
 ipedia.com: Ground sloth Article   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Ground sloths were edentate mammals that are extinct relatives of tree sloths and three-toed sloths that died out approximately 10,000 years ago.
Jefferson's and Harlan's ground sloths may be found as fossil remnants in the midwestern United States.
Two ground sloths are among the animals that were trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits: Harlan's ground sloth (Paramylodon harlani) was six feet tall when it reared up to browse high twigs and leaves.
www.ipedia.com /ground_sloth.html   (677 words)

  
 Mapinguari and Giant Ground Sloth Stamps
Megatherium was a giant ground sloth which reached nearly the size of an elephant, and therefore was much larger than the reported size of the Mapinguari.
Mylodon was a giant ground sloth whose reconstructed appearance resembles that of the Mapinguari.
The giant ground sloth appears as one panel on a souvenir sheet of twelve depicting prehistoric animals of the world.
www.pibburns.com /cryptost/mapingua.htm   (631 words)

  
 .:: Cape Fear Museum - Wilmington, NC ::.
The Wilmington giant ground sloth was 20 feet long and stood about 15 feet tall when reared up on its hind legs.
The sloth moved slowly, no more than one to two miles per hour, and left a footprint that was three feet long, one of the largest ever left by a land mammal.
Scientists know that the sloth was an adult animal because the ends of its bones are fused to the cores of its bones.
www.capefearmuseum.com /groundsloth.htm   (491 words)

  
 Sloth - Crystalinks
Even so, leaves provide little energy, and sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a creature of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30 to 34 degrees Celsius), and still lower temperatures when resting.
Eremotherium eomigrans, as named in a recent academic journal article, was the earliest of the giant sloths known as megatheres to have migrated from South America north across the Panamanian Land Bridge, Webb said.
A university geology student found the ground sloth bones in 1986 during a class field trip at the Haile limestone quarry west of Gainesville.
www.crystalinks.com /sloth.html   (1028 words)

  
 Brown Throated three-toed sloth
The two-toed sloth, a close relative of the three-toed sloth is identified as part of the family Megalonychidae, which recognizes two species Cholepus hoffmanni (Peters 1859), and Choloepus didactylus (Linne 1758).
Three ancestral ground sloth families are said to have once existed; Megatheriidae the South American giant ground sloth whose ancestors were arboreal, and the Megalonychidae and Mylondontidae which were always terrestrial ground sloths.
According to Webb (1985), one perspective indicates that the giant ground sloth of the late Cenozoic era were highly specialized end members of the phyllophagous xenarthrans while recent tree sloth’s are believed to be more representative of Miocene stages of sloth evolution.
bss.sfsu.edu /geog/bholzman/courses/fall99projects/sloth.htm   (3017 words)

  
 BBC - Science & Nature - Wildfacts - Giant ground sloth
Giant ground sloths were some of the strangest mammals ever to have lived and resembled no other animal.
From the preserved dung of other species of ground sloth it seems they were not fussy eaters and munched through all parts of plants and trees, fruits, leaves and twigs.
Ground sloths did have bones in their throat which allowed them to vocalise and it is thought that they may have called to each other.
www.bbc.co.uk /nature/wildfacts/factfiles/3002.shtml   (356 words)

  
 North American Ground Sloth
When it lived during the late ice age, the adult giant sloth weighed about 3 tons and reached a height of about nine feet on all fours and about 20 feet it stood upright on its back legs.
About 350 bones from three giant sloths were found at the Brunswick site but many were duplicates or were unusable and Brantley did not have all 208 bones necessary for one complete skeleton.
Two other giant North American sloth skeletons are on display at the Smithsonian Institution and one skeleton -- found in Georgia in the last century -- is at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Brantley said.
www.libs.uga.edu /science/sloth.html   (581 words)

  
 Fossil Record of the Xenarthra
The oldest fossils of ground sloths are of the family Meg atheriidae, found in Oligocene deposits in South America.
In the late Miocene, ground sloths began to spread from South America to the West Indies and southern North America, possibly by rafting across sea barriers as waif immigrants.
Giant sloth : Above at left, the skull of Glossotherium harlani, a giant ground sloth that roamed southern California in the Pleistocene.
www.ucmp.berkeley.edu /mammal/xenarthra/xenarthrafr.html   (939 words)

  
 Ground sloth   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Jefferson's and Harlan's Ground Sloths can be found as fossil remnants in the midwestern U.S. Families
Closeup of skull Jefferson's ground sloth has a special place in modern paleontology, for Thomas Jefferson's letter on Megalonyx ("great claw"), read before the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, in August 1796, marked the beginning of vertebrate paleontology in North America.
Harlan's ground sloth (''Paramylodon harlani''), National Museum of Natural History Modified from McKenna and Bell (1997).
ground-sloth.ask.dyndns.dk   (793 words)

  
 Ground sloth - Slider
Jefferson's and Harlan's Ground Sloths can be found as fossil remnants in the midwestern U.S. Table of contents
The last ground sloths died so recently that their dung ('coprolites') remains in caves.
A forest creature of the upper Amazon basin called the mapinguari may be a surviving tropical ground sloth.
enc.slider.com /Enc/Ground_sloth   (793 words)

  
 [No title]
Bones of a giant ground sloth from the ice age.
The giant ground sloth was one of the enormous creatures that thrived during the ice ages.
A competing theory, however, is that as man spread into regions occupied by the giant sloth, he may have hunted them, along with the mammoth and mastodons, to extinction.
unmuseum.mus.pa.us /sloth.htm   (683 words)

  
 Ladywildlifes Giant Ground Sloth Info Page
The giant ground sloth resembled a huge bear, with a broad head, thick skin, and a dense shaggy coat of dark fur that gave it protection from predators.
The giant ground sloth was a herbivorous animal that fed mainly on plants that grew on the ground.
The sloth and other edentates (simple toothed creatures) developed undisturbed and were unique to this part of the world.
ladywildlife.com /animal/giantgroundslothinfo.htm   (623 words)

  
 Ladywildlifes Giant Ground Sloth Info Page
The giant ground sloth resembled a huge bear, with a broad head, thick skin, and a dense shaggy coat of dark fur that gave it protection from predators.
The giant ground sloth was a herbivorous animal that fed mainly on plants that grew on the ground.
Food and Feeding: The giant ground sloth lived in the lightly wooded area s of South America, feeding on the leaves such as yuccas, agaves, and grasses.
www.ladywildlife.com /animal/giantgroundslothinfo.htm   (623 words)

  
 Sloth - educational resources
Sloths are extremely slow-moving mammals found in the rainforest canopies of Central and South America.
Giant Ice Age Sloth: The Giant Ice Age Sloth, Megalonyx jeffersoni, the famed "Giant Claw" discovered by Thomas Jefferson, stood almost ten feet tall and weighed 2-3 tons, as much...
Molecular Phylogeny of the Extinct Ground Sloth Mylodon darwinii: Molecular Phylogeny of the Extinct Ground Sloth Mylodon darwinii.
animals.mongabay.com /featured/Sloth.html   (540 words)

  
 Sloth   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Unlike modern sloths, which spend most of their time in trees, the ground sloths spent all of their time on the ground.
Ground sloths were large relatives of the modern two-toed sloths (Choloepus spp.) and three-toed sloths (Bradypus spp.).
The bone on the left is the finger bone (phalanx) that supports the claw on the thumb of a Jefferson's ground sloth.
www.museum.state.il.us /exhibits/larson/sloth.html   (530 words)

  
 Sloth
Sloths belong to the group called Xenarthrans, formerly called Edentata, including anteaters, glyptodonts, armadillos and sloths.
There were basically three different types or genus of sloths in Florida, the mylodontids, the megalonychids, and the megatheres.
In the teeth that follow, the smaller teeth are those of the earlier sloths.
www.paleoenterprises.com /sloth.htm   (323 words)

  
 Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country
Paul Martin, professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona, is the leading expert on the theory that humans were responsible for the extinction of such animals as the giant ground sloth, and he is skeptical of Oren’s theory.
Oren argues that a kind of giant ground sloth could still be alive in the Amazon because the forests offer huge, remote areas providing the isolation necessary for them to survive.
Scientists say giant ground sloths were once abundant in the Americas, as evidenced by fossil finds of the creatures in places as far apart as Patagonia in the south to the northwest United States.
www.unknowncountry.com /news/?id=1137   (935 words)

  
 David Oren & and Mapinguari news article
The animal species called ``Mapinguari,'' or giant defenders of the forests, by the Indians, is also known to the thousands of hunters that brave the forests every year.
Oren argues that a kind of giant ground sloth could still be alive in the Amazon because the forests offer huge, remote areas providing the necessary isolation to survive.
Scientists say giant ground sloths were in abundance across the Americas, evidenced by fossil finds of such creatures in places as far apart as Patagonia in the south to the northwest of the United States.
www.bigfootencounters.com /articles/brazil.htm   (1109 words)

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