Giant Ground Sloth

• GeneralA 4-tonne ground sloth; its fossils were collected by Darwin in South America.
• Georges Cuvier described it in 1796 from a skeleton sent from Argentina, and it was one of the first animals science formally recognised as an extinct species, a revolutionary idea in its day.
• Charles Darwin collected remains of Megatherium during the voyage of the Beagle, and those fossils shaped his thinking about the succession of species.
• It could rear up and walk on its hind legs, which makes it the largest bipedal mammal ever to have existed. It used its thick tail as a third point of support, like a tripod.
• Its enormous claws were not a hunter's: chemical analysis of its teeth confirms a vegetarian diet, and it used them to pull down branches.
• It weighed up to four tonnes, as much as an African elephant, but with a completely different body: massive hind legs, a thick pelvis and a centre of mass set far back.
• It lived alongside people. Fossils of it have been found bearing cut marks, and in Argentina there is a trackway of eight footprints dated to around 14,000 years ago, barely 40 km from the place where the young Darwin collected remains of the species.
• Cuvier described it in 1796 from a skeleton sent from Buenos Aires to Madrid, and it was one of the first fossil species to be recognised as a vanished animal.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (mammal)

Habitat and environment

Open woodland, savannah and pampas of South America during the Pliocene and Pleistocene

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium