Prehistoric sloth full#

The most important families of ground sloths were the Megalonychidae and Megatheriidae. This bore four families of ground sloths and one specifically of tree sloths. The sloth family tree comes from the Pilosa infraorder. Its three infraorders determined the lines of armadillo, anteater and sloth that are living today.

The other suborder, Xenathra, was more abundant, producing a large number of genera and species throughout the continent. One of these suborders was the Palaeanodonta, which had two families which died out after some 30 million years. No fossil remains have so far been discovered to link them with one common suborder, but they both have common characteristics that put them in the same nest. We know nothing of edentata before two suborders which were alive in the Paleocene era 60 million years ago. These are not enamelled but constantly grow as they wear away. Armadillos can have up to 100, while sloths have a few simple pegs. The anteaters, which catch their food with long, sticky tongues, are the only ones which do not have any. They were as big as rhinoceroses, with armour-plating fitted so tightly together that they looked like huge tortoises.Īll of these giants were edentata, an order of animals which has evolved into today’s sloths, armadillos and anteaters of South America. There were several kinds of giant sloths in South America in the Pleistocene era around 500,000 years ago, and living alongside them were giant armadillos like the glyptodonts. It was slow and rather cumbersomely built, but it could walk on its hind feet as well as on all fours. It lived on plants and had teeth only on the side of its jaws. This was the Megatherium, which grew to the size of a modern elephant and weighed several tons.

Prehistoric sloth full#

It is surprising, then, to discover that one of the ancestors of these creatures was seven metres long and lived a full and active life on the ground.

Babies spend the first two years of their lives clinging to their mothers’ backs. Their arms are longer than their legs and, on the ground, the sloths have to pull themselves along because they are incapable of walking. Their diet consists of leaves, shoots and fruits which take about four days to pass through their stomachs, and they only amble down from their trees about once a week to relieve themselves. Their long, curled toes hook round branches, allowing them to hang idly for most of their lives: even when they die they retain their grip on their branches. Sloths are nocturnal animals which live in the tropical forests of South and Central America, from Argentina to Nicaragua. The tree sloth is the slowest moving of mammals and amply deserves to be named after the last of the seven deadly sins – it spends only ten per cent of its time making any movement at all. But have they, perhaps, outlasted their more active ancestors for that very reason? Sloths are proverbially lazy – in the rainy season they camouflage themselves with mould rather than move. The Megatherium, a land sloth from South and Central America during the Pleistocene Age