GAINESVILLE — Scientists have confirmed that ancient bones found in Florida are evidence of a previously unknown species of ground sloth, the oldest of its kind ever found in North America.
Massive, hairy and slow, herds of these gigantic sloths lumbered across the Florida peninsula 2.2 million years ago, munching on live oaks, magnolia trees and sweet gum, University of Florida paleontologist David Webb said.
Up to 17 feet high and weighing five tons, Eremotherium eomigrans, as named in a recent academic journal article, was bigger than an African bull elephant. They used enormous claws to strip leaves from branches up to 20 feet long, Webb said, and entwine them in their long tongues.
“This is a great, wonderful animal unlike anything in existence, whose huge size is almost reminiscent of the dinosaurs,” Webb said.
The bones were found by a geology student in 1986, in a limestone quarry west of Gainesville. Over the years a dozen of the sloths have been found at the same site, some with fully articulated skeletons, Webb said.
In 1989, Webb invited two of the world’s leading specialists on such animals to examine the bones. Castor Cartelle, a zoologist from the University of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and Gerardo De Iuliis, a zoologist from the University of Toronto in Canada, studied the bones for a decade before concluding this was a new, huge find.
Their findings were published as a 20-page paper in the December issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.
Evidence of similar creatures has been found in South America, which makes researchers suspect that Florida’s sloth could have migrated across the Panamanian land bridge.
But unlike other large sloths, which had four fingers including two or three claws, this sloth had five fingers and four claws, evidence of a primitive stage of development, Webb said. Its biggest claw was about a foot long.
Modern tree sloths, which live in Central and South America, are about the size of a house cat and have three toes.
Webb said Florida’s gigantic sloth probably died out 50,000 years ago.