ground sloth
laelaps | May 18, 2010A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters.
For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history…
laelaps | May 10, 2010The skeleton of Megatherium, as figured in William Buckland's Geology and Mineralogy Considered With Reference to Natural Theology.
There is something fantastically weird about giant ground sloths. Creatures from a not-too-distant past, close enough in time that their hair and hide is sometimes found in circumstances of exceptional preservation, these creatures have no living equivalent. Their arboreal cousins still live in the tropics of the western hemisphere, but they can hardly be considered proxies for the ground sloths of the Pleistocene.
The most famous of these ancient beasts was…