Thanks for the shout-out! This video is great. Well put together and articulated. Good points all around. The reasons you explore were why the giant sloths in Kaimere run a bit of a gambit regarding fur covering, with the water sloths either being hairless or with short dense otter-like fur. Keep up the good work!
With Xenarthrans having a lower body temperature and metabolism than most mammals, I'd think they would keep their hair. I like the idea of more otter-like fur for the sea sloths, hadn't considered that.
Still, otters are pretty small. Paleo Analysis mentioned whales and sea lions but I think a swimming sloth would probably more resemble the manatee lifestyle. I think the largest mammals that swim a lot and still maintain hairy coats would be polar bears. I'm not sure when they lived but if it was during the Ice Age then maybe furry coats could have still been a thing.
If marine sloths had fur, I believe that they would've probably had fur akin to seals. (Yes, seals but elephant seals are covered in fur. It's just that the fur length is short.)
Until I started watching this channel I didn't even know that sloths & anteaters were related! 👀 You don't just learn about paleo history here, you learn about EVERYTHING. It's awesome!
Interesting topic, possibility of hairless ground sloths never crossed my mind, but it kinda makes sence to me now. Maybe Thalassconus had blubber layer like extant sea mammals, and looked similar to modern elephant seals.
Great video on a subject that is great to think about. I like the way you organized the information. The points are clearly presented, and the evidence is well analysed. This video earned you atleast one new subscriber. Now on the subject matter I think the reason most people lean towards the hairy sloths has to do with the fact that there's always a bias to some degree when an iconic animal is being discussed. I personaly am accepting of the idea that the very biggest ground sloths may have been mostly hairless like elephants and rhinos, but if I get to draw one I usually go for a short pelt rather than naked skin (it's an entirely esthetic choice though). How great it would be if we end up finding atleast a partially mummified Eremotherium or Megatherium remains, but for now we are free to speculate, which is both the greatest and most frustrating part about paleontology.
One thing I haven't seen people talk about is how much the environment can vary. South America is not all just a big jungle. The more southern parts of the continent (which Megatherium would have mostly inhabited) can get pretty temperate and chilly at times, and it makes sense as it's further from the equator so we can assume it was similar in the past. As for Eremotherium, I would say it's the strongest contender for hair loss as it's right up in the Amazon, Central and southern North America.
Yeah those are the ones that I see the most Paleo art of with that sort of depiction. Like I said I definitely see that as plausible. But to me aquatic sloths like Thalassocnus would be the most likely to be hairless or at least have really reduced hair.
I feel like the larger species of ground sloth would have had fur similar to that of a short haired german shepherd. It's thick enough to keep bugs off but thin enough that they don't struggle very much when it's hot outside.
One of the main factors in that would depend on how similar or different large sloths were to modern Xenarthrans. Unfortunately that's a difficult thing to even make an educated guess on.
Huh, maybe the Shasta sloths were part of a propagation method for the Joshua trees? Well if they were eating the portions with the seeds. But it could be that the dried bits could be a good source of fiber for them too. I agree that most of them should have quite a bit of hair. Even the Sea Sloths. They could have a slightly green color to their fur to help them blend in with the plants they ate. Since they dived around in shallows and where there was a lot of waves. (Lots of evidence of broken/healed bones) and we know whales ate them, it could be they grew long long hair to try to blend in with the sea grasses. Whales do not exactly have 20/20 eyesight so when these fellows sat in the water clinging to rocks they could feasibly look like a bed of grass if a whale swam by. Though that is just a completely and more than likely utterly wrong speculation. Fun to think of though. For a speculative biology theme.
The Shasta ground sloths were almost certainly important for Joshua tree propagation, as the trees appear to have stopped spreading after they went extinct.
@@eljanrimsa5843 I think that could be worked around with a multi-generational project, depending on how much the mother's size impacts fetal development... the giant part, that is. There being no close living relatives at all is a major handicap.
Could y'all imagine if sasquatch lore came from homo sapiens finding giant sloths and going to its friends like 'bruh I just found this weird giant hairy person'
There are partial hides of both the Shasta and Harlan’s ground sloth, which is how we figured out that the Harlan’s ground sloth had bony ossicles in its skin like Mylodon
They're some of my favorites for sure! I'll definitely be covering more about them in the future. Don't know when I will get to do a spotlight video on them since I don't have any skull casts though.
Thank you for noticing Kaimere. A project I highly enjoy and like to geek out about. And the sloths on Kaimere are also amazing. Many marine sloths and land sloths.
As creature artist I would love to draw some of these animals. Especially the marine sloths. The only problem is that being a creature artist and not a paleo artist I costantly need a feedback to avoid to turn an animal into a monster 🤣Videos like this one are gold. One, day, the otter-like marine slotsh will be in my portfolio. Keep up with the good work!
I once read a story about how the indians in south america kept sloths in caves. I'm not judging here, I didn't have to clean up the mess afterwards. But maybe there was some sloth hair left over in the cave that was recovered. Might add some light onto the question. Great videos, by the way.
The closest living relatives of the Darwin's Ground Sloth (Mylodon darwini) are the Two-Toed Sloths (genus Choloepus), while the closest living relatives of both the Jefferson's Ground Sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) and Cuvier's Colossal Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum) are the Three-Toed Sloths (genus Bradypus)
Woah... 7:44 That ant eater's front left leg looks like the profile view of a Panda face.... or a shaggy white dog... I thought there was some other animal in front of the ant eater for a second! That's trippy.
I think that giant sloth brain cavity analysis show that they were more active than modern sloth All ground sloth were more active than tree sloth (not the same threath and ressources)
Just found your channel through Instagram and holy fuck! If you would show me your videos and told me you had like 50k subs I would believe you. You've got an increadible production quality for being such an unknown creator. You've got 1 more sub on RUclips and follower on Instagram :)
Thank you so much and welcome aboard! don't forget to check out Keenan's channel as well as even though he makes content about animals that are technically fictional, he's done an outstanding job of using real world biological science to make the creatures of his world make sense. It's really good stuff!
They probably had thick, coarse fur similar to that of most brown bears. For an animal of that size, it would be fairly active, and so evolution wise, long hair wouldn’t be a desirable choice, therefore something short and coarse would be chosen instead.
@@eljanrimsa5843 I’m aware both existed, however both tended to have more thick and coarse fur rather than long soft fur, which they would likely possess during infancy, but would quickly shed it for more durable fur during adolescence to assist in both keeping warmth and assisting with heat distribution when it got warm. The same would go for a giant sloth.
Could you comment about the way the colors and/or fur that are used in art? I'm honestly bothered how in many pictures ancient animals (and humans) have very messy fur/hair. Like if you compare the living anteater with long fur to pictures of giant sloth or mammoths. Wild animals take good care of their fur so it is kind of weird that they are often drawn with messy and kinda ugly fur. Same with dinosaurs and such when they are often drawn in grey colors.
I have a particular interest because a ground sloth was found a couple of miles from home in Las Vegas. It would need a coat now, much more so, back then.
I'm pretty sure the most common ground sloth in the South Western US was the Shasta Ground Sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) and those definitely had fur.
Hair with sweat is actually a coolant. The hair once wet with sweat cools the body by using cold sweat. Another thing about the sloth is that they have organism that actually live in their fur.
I know it's not the same, but one day if elephants go extinct I imagine we'll compare them to hyrax the same way we compare giant ground sloth to tree sloths today.
If the evidence found at Tanque Loma in Ecuador is reinforced with other findings, Eremotherium was ecologically similar to hippo's, which implies they're hairless, or mostly hairless.
It cannot be completely rejected, but both modern relatives and species we have proof of have fur, so it is very unlikely. Also their relatives have some issues with keeping body heat - hair are an advantage in such cases.
Some scients are now not sure about the small forest horses theory/idea. the thinking is those were just the best preserved fossils of a close relative to horses. 2. sea sloths could have went the otter/mustads route and extra hair.
While the common pronunciation of the word has now come to be sloth with a short O just through ignorance, the actual, technical pronunciation is like slowth, with a long O. The whole point of the term is that it means slowness. Oh, and you DEFINITELY should pronounce the T in glyptodont.
The Tanque Loma find in Ecuador of Eremotherium implies that they lived like hippos more than rhinos or elephants, which is why they can co-habitat in the same environment.
Well, the sloths that are alive today live in South and central America which are hot tropical climates, and they have hair/fur. so, I'm thinking that most or all of prehistoric sloth species had hair/fur.
oh I don't like that sea sloth art. if I was to reconstruct Thalassocnus, I'd have toned back the wrinkles and toned up the body fat. Like somewhere between a seal and a hippo.
4:37 how you just SKIP OVER that a Shasta ground sloths favorite food was the incredibly spiny Joshua tree? How did it eat that? Did that have special adaptions for eating spiny plants? That single sentence raises many questions in my mind.
even the larger ground sloths like megatherium or eremotherium probably STILL had hair even at there elephant sizes. There's many reason we can assume that. There ancestors and close relatives have very shaggy coats. There metabolism is wayy lower than those other placental mammals like elephants and rhinos which keeps them cooler. They tend to live in forested areas which has more shade and protection from the sun. They dig small caves with those long claws of theres and live in those small caves which they can use as shelter from the sun during warmer day times and they could come out at night. Everything from there lifestyle there habitats and biology suggests having little to no hair is unlikely for even the largest ground sloths. Even for the maire sloths having no hair still makes little sense do to there biology and lifestyle. Thalassocnus has the same lower metabolism as the other sloth species which effects a Marine creature way more. Water are usually cooler than the air on the land and can conduct heat way better than air. Having no protection against that with a lower metabolism is practically a death sentence comparing sloths to sealions and whales is ridiculous when you consider the metabolisms.Have small but thick otter like hair is one way easier and more likely to evolve from an already hairy species and two probably necessary due to it not being fully aquatic like people try to make it seem.It definitely spent a lot of time on land and was probably more akin to the life of a polar bear than to a manatee or sea lion. Also it was around the same size as a polar bear only being a little larger it'd be ridiculous to assume a polar bear was hairless just because it was semi-aquatic. I dont think any of the ground sloths were hairless(or effectively hairless like elephants) because of there large differences from other large mammals there the only very large mammal in the order xenarthra so of course its hard to predict what its feature were like due to not having any good references to go off of.
I have always been fascinated with giant ground sloths and when I saw this video, clicked on it immediately. I can't help but think that the sloths migration from South America north was on its way to Asia but ran into humans going the other way. Your map showing location of discovered Megalonyx and time frame of ice free corridors into Alaska make this seem plausible to me. A slow moving furry beast would make for a prized kill for migrating humans. Somewhere on the internet I read that sloths could be partially be responsible for the distribution of avocados! Thank you for your analysis and I would be fascinated with more sloth information.
Anything over 1000 kg or so will usually not have long fur unless it lives in a snowy environment. It seems like all the tropical ones would be hairless if warm blooded. If they were mesotherms I could see thick coats of fur head to toe even in the largest examples, due to the necessity of keeping the small amount of heat their body does generate in their body.
I feel like you might have skewed your poll results by making the two options so extreme. There’s a lot of types of fur between “hairless” and “shaggy”. It seems unlikely to me that any sloths would have been completely nude, but they may have had varying types of short and/or thin fur.
Thanks for the shout-out! This video is great. Well put together and articulated. Good points all around. The reasons you explore were why the giant sloths in Kaimere run a bit of a gambit regarding fur covering, with the water sloths either being hairless or with short dense otter-like fur. Keep up the good work!
With Xenarthrans having a lower body temperature and metabolism than most mammals, I'd think they would keep their hair. I like the idea of more otter-like fur for the sea sloths, hadn't considered that.
Still, otters are pretty small. Paleo Analysis mentioned whales and sea lions but I think a swimming sloth would probably more resemble the manatee lifestyle. I think the largest mammals that swim a lot and still maintain hairy coats would be polar bears. I'm not sure when they lived but if it was during the Ice Age then maybe furry coats could have still been a thing.
@@Imperiused I want to say Miocene, without looking it up.
@@ImperiusedThat's what I was thinking too. Polar bears are considered marine mammals and their fur helps with added buoyancy as well as insulation.
If marine sloths had fur, I believe that they would've probably had fur akin to seals. (Yes, seals but elephant seals are covered in fur. It's just that the fur length is short.)
Elephant seals have hair. That being said they routinely dive down into water that is 2° C
Until I started watching this channel I didn't even know that sloths & anteaters were related! 👀 You don't just learn about paleo history here, you learn about EVERYTHING. It's awesome!
Interesting topic, possibility of hairless ground sloths never crossed my mind, but it kinda makes sence to me now. Maybe Thalassconus had blubber layer like extant sea mammals, and looked similar to modern elephant seals.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how surreal it is to see a map with a completely green Antarctic?
Not completely. There was a white, icy circle in the center.
Great video on a subject that is great to think about. I like the way you organized the information. The points are clearly presented, and the evidence is well analysed. This video earned you atleast one new subscriber.
Now on the subject matter I think the reason most people lean towards the hairy sloths has to do with the fact that there's always a bias to some degree when an iconic animal is being discussed. I personaly am accepting of the idea that the very biggest ground sloths may have been mostly hairless like elephants and rhinos, but if I get to draw one I usually go for a short pelt rather than naked skin (it's an entirely esthetic choice though). How great it would be if we end up finding atleast a partially mummified Eremotherium or Megatherium remains, but for now we are free to speculate, which is both the greatest and most frustrating part about paleontology.
One thing I haven't seen people talk about is how much the environment can vary. South America is not all just a big jungle. The more southern parts of the continent (which Megatherium would have mostly inhabited) can get pretty temperate and chilly at times, and it makes sense as it's further from the equator so we can assume it was similar in the past.
As for Eremotherium, I would say it's the strongest contender for hair loss as it's right up in the Amazon, Central and southern North America.
As I recall, the argument for lack of hair was for the largest ones, like Megatherium or Eremotherium, not all of the species of Ground Sloths.
Yeah those are the ones that I see the most Paleo art of with that sort of depiction. Like I said I definitely see that as plausible. But to me aquatic sloths like Thalassocnus would be the most likely to be hairless or at least have really reduced hair.
i chose to believe that marine sloths had otter like hair the other option is just too horrifying
I feel like the larger species of ground sloth would have had fur similar to that of a short haired german shepherd. It's thick enough to keep bugs off but thin enough that they don't struggle very much when it's hot outside.
One of the main factors in that would depend on how similar or different large sloths were to modern Xenarthrans. Unfortunately that's a difficult thing to even make an educated guess on.
@@PaleoAnalysis what about the coprolites in Gypsum Cave in Nevada? Any evidence of hairs from grooming?
@@PaleoAnalysis lmfao you just answered my question. Great video!
Oddly specific choice; short haired German Shepard
@@Specogecko he prob has a german shepherd and was looking at it while typing
Huh, maybe the Shasta sloths were part of a propagation method for the Joshua trees? Well if they were eating the portions with the seeds. But it could be that the dried bits could be a good source of fiber for them too. I agree that most of them should have quite a bit of hair. Even the Sea Sloths. They could have a slightly green color to their fur to help them blend in with the plants they ate. Since they dived around in shallows and where there was a lot of waves. (Lots of evidence of broken/healed bones) and we know whales ate them, it could be they grew long long hair to try to blend in with the sea grasses. Whales do not exactly have 20/20 eyesight so when these fellows sat in the water clinging to rocks they could feasibly look like a bed of grass if a whale swam by.
Though that is just a completely and more than likely utterly wrong speculation. Fun to think of though. For a speculative biology theme.
The Shasta ground sloths were almost certainly important for Joshua tree propagation, as the trees appear to have stopped spreading after they went extinct.
I think a giant sloth would be more interesting to clone than a woolly mammoth
But there's no giant relative alive to act as surrogate mother.
Megaloceros
@@eljanrimsa5843 I think that could be worked around with a multi-generational project, depending on how much the mother's size impacts fetal development... the giant part, that is. There being no close living relatives at all is a major handicap.
@@eljanrimsa5843 We could theoretically build an artificial womb?
Could y'all imagine if sasquatch lore came from homo sapiens finding giant sloths and going to its friends like 'bruh I just found this weird giant hairy person'
That makes some sense tho! 😂
@@apexnext yeah
imagine a naked sasquatch...oh...that's us.
At 7:51-
Am I the only one who immediately saw a pandas face in the anteater's arm fur lol?
I didn’t know it was possible but the idea of a sea sloth being eaten by a carnivorous whale just got a lot more horrific
There are partial hides of both the Shasta and Harlan’s ground sloth, which is how we figured out that the Harlan’s ground sloth had bony ossicles in its skin like Mylodon
Funny how dinosaurs gains body coverings while ancient mammals lose them.
Can't wait for the next video about fur vs furless Shambler
4:04 Funny it's Sid the Sloth color
Great video! Ancient Sloths are definitely interesting.
They're some of my favorites for sure! I'll definitely be covering more about them in the future. Don't know when I will get to do a spotlight video on them since I don't have any skull casts though.
Thank you for noticing Kaimere. A project I highly enjoy and like to geek out about. And the sloths on Kaimere are also amazing. Many marine sloths and land sloths.
I found Keenan's channel because of you and I absolutely flabbergasted
Thanks for showing me the world of kaimere, it's great
Please make more in the history of the world. I love that series the most of all that you do. Please make more
As creature artist I would love to draw some of these animals. Especially the marine sloths.
The only problem is that being a creature artist and not a paleo artist I costantly need a feedback to avoid to turn an animal into a monster 🤣Videos like this one are gold.
One, day, the otter-like marine slotsh will be in my portfolio.
Keep up with the good work!
I once read a story about how the indians in south america kept sloths in caves. I'm not judging here, I didn't have to clean up the mess afterwards. But maybe there was some sloth hair left over in the cave that was recovered. Might add some light onto the question. Great videos, by the way.
The closest living relatives of the Darwin's Ground Sloth (Mylodon darwini) are the Two-Toed Sloths (genus Choloepus), while the closest living relatives of both the Jefferson's Ground Sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) and Cuvier's Colossal Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum) are the Three-Toed Sloths (genus Bradypus)
Woah... 7:44 That ant eater's front left leg looks like the profile view of a Panda face.... or a shaggy white dog...
I thought there was some other animal in front of the ant eater for a second! That's trippy.
I think that giant sloth brain cavity analysis show that they were more active than modern sloth
All ground sloth were more active than tree sloth (not the same threath and ressources)
Just found your channel through Instagram and holy fuck! If you would show me your videos and told me you had like 50k subs I would believe you. You've got an increadible production quality for being such an unknown creator.
You've got 1 more sub on RUclips and follower on Instagram :)
Thank you so much and welcome aboard! don't forget to check out Keenan's channel as well as even though he makes content about animals that are technically fictional, he's done an outstanding job of using real world biological science to make the creatures of his world make sense. It's really good stuff!
@@PaleoAnalysis I just found your channel today and also gave you a sub!
@@PaleoAnalysis just found your channel last night. You’ve got a new subscriber!
2:27 damn I looked at the arm of the anteater and I can only see the face of a Panda.
Wow, a new cursed animal!
Though the diving sloth could've been hairless, it may have had a coat like that of a sea lion which is oily and slicks back
They probably had thick, coarse fur similar to that of most brown bears. For an animal of that size, it would be fairly active, and so evolution wise, long hair wouldn’t be a desirable choice, therefore something short and coarse would be chosen instead.
Do you believe woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos never existed?
@@eljanrimsa5843 I’m aware both existed, however both tended to have more thick and coarse fur rather than long soft fur, which they would likely possess during infancy, but would quickly shed it for more durable fur during adolescence to assist in both keeping warmth and assisting with heat distribution when it got warm. The same would go for a giant sloth.
Dude I was positive the picture of the anteater also had a panda standing in front of it. It took so long to realize its paw just looks like that
Could you comment about the way the colors and/or fur that are used in art? I'm honestly bothered how in many pictures ancient animals (and humans) have very messy fur/hair. Like if you compare the living anteater with long fur to pictures of giant sloth or mammoths. Wild animals take good care of their fur so it is kind of weird that they are often drawn with messy and kinda ugly fur.
Same with dinosaurs and such when they are often drawn in grey colors.
I have a particular interest because a ground sloth was found a couple of miles from home in Las Vegas. It would need a coat now, much more so, back then.
I'm pretty sure the most common ground sloth in the South Western US was the Shasta Ground Sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) and those definitely had fur.
Hair with sweat is actually a coolant. The hair once wet with sweat cools the body by using cold sweat. Another thing about the sloth is that they have organism that actually live in their fur.
Sweating is a human specialty. Humans and horses have enough sweat glands to achieve a cooling effect, but most mammals don't
I know it's not the same, but one day if elephants go extinct I imagine we'll compare them to hyrax the same way we compare giant ground sloth to tree sloths today.
If the evidence found at Tanque Loma in Ecuador is reinforced with other findings, Eremotherium was ecologically similar to hippo's, which implies they're hairless, or mostly hairless.
It cannot be completely rejected, but both modern relatives and species we have proof of have fur, so it is very unlikely.
Also their relatives have some issues with keeping body heat - hair are an advantage in such cases.
Some scients are now not sure about the small forest horses theory/idea. the thinking is those were just the best preserved fossils of a close relative to horses.
2. sea sloths could have went the otter/mustads route and extra hair.
While the common pronunciation of the word has now come to be sloth with a short O just through ignorance, the actual, technical pronunciation is like slowth, with a long O. The whole point of the term is that it means slowness.
Oh, and you DEFINITELY should pronounce the T in glyptodont.
I'm sure the bigger ones in large environments where hairless, otherwise why would their be hairless mammoths?
I meant warm environments, not large...
The Tanque Loma find in Ecuador of Eremotherium implies that they lived like hippos more than rhinos or elephants, which is why they can co-habitat in the same environment.
Well, the sloths that are alive today live in South and central America which are hot tropical climates, and they have hair/fur. so, I'm thinking that most or all of prehistoric sloth species had hair/fur.
well, fur can have different uses and giant sloths were, well, giant. they could not need fur bc they are just so big that the heat stays inside
The real question is, did any of the Sloth's with hair, ever rock a Mullet?
Jerri curls😎
Polar bear styles hair length for the swimmer?
Why did all these sloths gone extinct?
Either people or changing environment
Self confidence
I have one living next door to me. His name is Bill.
Hairless or furry? XD
@@PaleoAnalysis He Manscapes.
That dead sloth image is absolute gore
oh I don't like that sea sloth art. if I was to reconstruct Thalassocnus, I'd have toned back the wrinkles and toned up the body fat. Like somewhere between a seal and a hippo.
Natural selection tells me that a Sloth would be a hairy critter through all of it's evolutions,
Thank you for being respectful with handling this subject. Really appreciate tackling it from different angles. Keep up the good work 👏!
Do u believe in evolution doesn't it proves Adam eve inc- est wrong and Islam is a lie
4:37 how you just SKIP OVER that a Shasta ground sloths favorite food was the incredibly spiny Joshua tree? How did it eat that? Did that have special adaptions for eating spiny plants? That single sentence raises many questions in my mind.
A hairless giant sloth sounds cursed lol.
Now do bears!
I totally agree with you,I don't want the giant sloths to look like a giant naked mole rat
All I'm gunna say is look at ant-eaters. They are ground dwelling and super shaggy and related.
Ooh! I love Giant sloths:
Giant alien fetuses
That made me bust out laughing
There is also the Unicorn!
even the larger ground sloths like megatherium or eremotherium probably STILL had hair even at there elephant sizes. There's many reason we can assume that. There ancestors and close relatives have very shaggy coats. There metabolism is wayy lower than those other placental mammals like elephants and rhinos which keeps them cooler. They tend to live in forested areas which has more shade and protection from the sun. They dig small caves with those long claws of theres and live in those small caves which they can use as shelter from the sun during warmer day times and they could come out at night. Everything from there lifestyle there habitats and biology suggests having little to no hair is unlikely for even the largest ground sloths. Even for the maire sloths having no hair still makes little sense do to there biology and lifestyle. Thalassocnus has the same lower metabolism as the other sloth species which effects a Marine creature way more. Water are usually cooler than the air on the land and can conduct heat way better than air. Having no protection against that with a lower metabolism is practically a death sentence comparing sloths to sealions and whales is ridiculous when you consider the metabolisms.Have small but thick otter like hair is one way easier and more likely to evolve from an already hairy species and two probably necessary due to it not being fully aquatic like people try to make it seem.It definitely spent a lot of time on land and was probably more akin to the life of a polar bear than to a manatee or sea lion. Also it was around the same size as a polar bear only being a little larger it'd be ridiculous to assume a polar bear was hairless just because it was semi-aquatic. I dont think any of the ground sloths were hairless(or effectively hairless like elephants) because of there large differences from other large mammals there the only very large mammal in the order xenarthra so of course its hard to predict what its feature were like due to not having any good references to go off of.
I have always been fascinated with giant ground sloths and when I saw this video, clicked on it immediately. I can't help but think that the sloths migration from South America north was on its way to Asia but ran into humans going the other way. Your map showing location of discovered Megalonyx and time frame of ice free corridors into Alaska make this seem plausible to me. A slow moving furry beast would make for a prized kill for migrating humans. Somewhere on the internet I read that sloths could be partially be responsible for the distribution of avocados! Thank you for your analysis and I would be fascinated with more sloth information.
Well, we actually have a lot of hair and skin (with fur on it) from ground sloths... so I think not.
please do a video about turtles and their relatives
Ok, recreating a dinosaur still isnt rly a thing
BUT
could we recreate a terrorbird????
It wouldn't be cheep.
@@tyranitararmaldo thats the only reason? Oh come on 😔
There are ppl eating diamonds on their icecream but they wouldnt pay for mf dinosaurs?!😂
@@KalleVonEi I am so disappointed that I accidentally misspelled it and ruined the pun xD
@@tyranitararmaldo ah man😂
Commenting here to nudge the algorithm
maybe they had the same type of skin as a modern elephant and maybe grew hair over millions of years
Sloths are one of my favorite animals.
What if MegaLonyx became... Sasquatch?
Anything over 1000 kg or so will usually not have long fur unless it lives in a snowy environment. It seems like all the tropical ones would be hairless if warm blooded. If they were mesotherms I could see thick coats of fur head to toe even in the largest examples, due to the necessity of keeping the small amount of heat their body does generate in their body.
would they have been partly hairless and partly harry just like humans?
Well we know that many species dug tunnels like moles so were these even sloths as we understand the modern species?
I seem to recall the discovery of a rolled up megatherium skin in a repurposed tunnel discovered over forty years ago.
I bet their body hair was much like ours.
Awesome animals regardless
Science doesn’t care about your feelings… One of the science definitions.
Would not recommend looking at the deceased sloth with his fur missing before sleep. I dreamed a whole apocalypse with those things 🤣🤣
This brilliantly put together video has just earned you new subscriber
We're giant sloths hairless? Oof, I hope not!
There's been so much Paleo art depicting it that I felt it was a question that needed to be asked. 🤷♂️
@@PaleoAnalysis oh aye, it's a good question; having potentially-horrifying answers doesn't change that.
im scare
Ahhhh sloth poop, got to love it!!!
Found one in a tar pit?
It makes sense if larger mammals like whales, elephants, and rhinos are low with fur content in their warmer climates.
I would give my life savings just to build a Time Machine
They need to be fluffy
I cant let hairless sloth enter my nightmares
"the land bridge between north and south america" you mean central america?
Vegetarians have flat teeth and omnivores have sharp teeth
With that many different species at least one might have evolved that way
Hairless Chewbacca?
Of course they weren’t, imagine a hairless animal, it’s too weird
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Imagine if one of these bad boys had been able to cross into asia through land bridge at some point
I feel like you might have skewed your poll results by making the two options so extreme. There’s a lot of types of fur between “hairless” and “shaggy”. It seems unlikely to me that any sloths would have been completely nude, but they may have had varying types of short and/or thin fur.
If they end up being hairless can we call them trolls? Because they totally look like trolls.
Sloth
?
I rhink megatherium would have a short coat of fur like that of a short haired dog
Giant hairless sloths, they have pros and cons; but what about a very furry, double coated one?
0:26 😂
Giant Bingus.