![]() ![]() Rumor has it that the Mini-Sloths still live on till this day. With their biological advancements, the mini sloths use seal-like bodies to escape their worst nightmares. With large primary mammals such as wooly mammoth and saber-tooth tigers on the prowl, the mini sloths use their cold blooded adaptations to navigate the treacherous arctic waters. Unlike most mammals, the Mini-Sloths evolved to develop cold-blood and flexible spines to best adapt to their predatory environment. The mini-sloths revered fire and declared any that produced fire for them their "Fire King". Mini-sloths possessed an advanced knowledge of science, knowing that the ice in their habitat was melting due to subterranean activity, though they followed such superstitions as the idea of “bad juju”, or divine misfortune, affecting them, along with ritual sacrifice, and believed that by offering a sacrifice to the Earth the melting ice would cease. Unlike the larger ground sloths, mini-sloths were much more advanced, residing in large congregations rather than living individually as larger sloths did. Mini-sloths were about a third the size of ground sloths and tended to appear in brighter colors than their larger relatives, ranging from blue and red to yellow and green. The findings were published online April 15 in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.They appear to be Neocnus, an tiny version of the ground sloth, mini-sloths sported the same features as their larger relatives: elongated necks, ovular heads with eyes on either side, stout nose, long forearms with clawed paws, short legs with clawed feet and short, scrubby tails. ![]() In one case in the 1970s, during the dry season, a herd of hippos in Tanzania filled a shrinking watering hole with their feces photos of the wallow showed "a small group of live hippos in the water and many hippo corpses on the shore," and the herd shrank from 140 hippos to around 40 in just one week, the researchers wrote.īased on the evidence from Ecuador, the giant ground sloths likely met a similar fate. More recently, hippos have died en masse in marshy locations dirtied by enormous quantities of their poo, the scientists said. But their relief took a deadly turn after the animals fouled the marsh with their feces, they would have later eaten contaminated plants and drunk polluted water, leading to their deaths from pathogens lurking in those feces. So, what killed all those sloths? One likely explanation is that they wallowed together in a watering hole as do modern large herbivores, such as wildebeests and hippos, to escape heat and insects. The sloth bones were surrounded by plants that appeared to have been chewed and digested. The scientists also analyzed the soil around the bones and plant matter at the site, identifying the location as a marsh that periodically dried up, allowing ground plants to flourish. Matzke, et al., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (2020), ) (opens in new tab) Unlike preserved vegetation from the La Brea deposits (A), many of the plant fragments in the Tanque Loma deposit - (B) and (C) - are uniform in length and have sharp edges, suggesting that they came from sloth coprolites or gut contents. ![]()
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