How Sloths Went From the Seas to the Trees
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
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The story of sloths is one of astounding ecological variability, with some foraging in the seas, others living underground, and others still hiding from predators in towering cliffs. So why are their only living relatives in the trees?
Thanks to Ceri Thomas for allowing us to use few sloth reconstructions! Check out more of Ceri's paleoart at / alphynix and nixillustration...
And thanks as always to Franz Anthony and everyone at 252mya.com for their great paleoart.
Produced for PBS Digital Studios.
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Katie Fichtner, Aldo Espinosa Zúñiga, Anthony Callaghan, Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle, Gregory Donovan, Ehit Dinesh Agarwal, الخليفي سلطان, Gabriel Cortez, Marcus Lejon, Anel Salas, Robert Arévalo, Robert Hill, Kelby Reid, Todd Dittman, Betsy Radley, PS, Colin Sylvester, Philip Slingerland, John Vanek, Jose Garcia, Noah offitzer, Eric Vonk, Tony Wamsley, Henrik Peteri, Jonathan Wright, Jon Monteiro, James Bording, Brad Nicholls, Miles Chaston, Michael McClellan, Jeff Graham, Maria Humphrey, Nathan Paskett, Connor Jensen, Sapjes, Daisuke Goto, Hubert Rady, Yuntao Zhou, Gregory Kintz, Tyson Cleary, Chandler Bass, Maly Lor, Joao Ascensao, Tsee Lee, Sarah Fritts, Ruben Winter, Ron Harvey Jr, Jacob Gerke, Alex Yan
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References:
link.springer....
www.tandfonlin...
www.pnas.org/co...
www.cambridge....
www.jstor.org/...
onlinelibrary....
www.tandfonlin...
palaeo-electro...
link.springer....
eurekamag.com/...
www.tandfonlin...
link.springer....
link.springer....
link.springer....
www.ncbi.nlm.n...
www.bioone.org/...
academic.oup.c...
link.springer....
www.ncbi.nlm.n...
peerj.com/arti...
www.tandfonlin...
www.researchga...
Anyone else want to see an Eons style, full-length documentary about literally anything? Take my money.
Michael Erler YES!!
Yes!!
HELL YE
Dito
Check out its ok to be smart
Sloths know they're old
"we've done everything, let's just not anymore"
Lava: WHOMST HAS SOMOND ME
@@iskkudcjr1126 *summoned, also wth do you mean?
@@Seismitoad3 Sloths..Lava.. doesn't end well for sloths i'm guessing. Just my 2 cents.
@@Seismitoad3 it's internet cute speak people do to mimic animals. Chill out
"there's nothing we can do"
I'm really curious about the evolutionary history of bats. It's been on my mind the past couple weeks, and I'd love to see you guys break it down
The question of where bats split off has driven biologists batshit crazy.
That pun was guano.
But yeah, some people group them with the primatomorpha on the basis of morphology, others in a clade called "pegasoferae," which actually places them as sister taxa to the ungulates, of all things, on the basis of the molecular clock. There's a reasonably sized fossil record- and we know some interesting things, like how echolocation actually appeared twice- but no one's sure where it actually, well, started. So it's a mess. Until someone finds a transitional bat fossil from the paleocene or eocene, it'll probably stay that way.
We don't really know enough about them. We've never found a transitional bat fossil. Even the earliest known bat fossils could fly.
+
Agreed!! Great video idea!
@@renatoe9648 ml
to show my respect for the sloths, I played this video in 0.25x
Respect to you Kyon Kyon! Busted out laughing!
If you want to watch it the way the a sloth would perceive it, watch at 2x speed
How drunk did hank sound?
@@epauletshark3793 I would call it "Barney Gumble" drunk, only drunker. Give it a try.
Respecc
He prottecc
He attacc
But most importantly
He went from the seas to the trees for additional snacc
Noice
beautiful.
Goodjob
His teeth grow bacc
Noice
"Metabolically challenged" is my new favourite insult.
making fun of sloth's truly is a slow burn!
Metabolically
I'm hypothyroidic and I won't stand for you insulting my sloth brethren.
But I will hang around for it.
A new word to offend SJWs
My other favourite on these channels was the "Metrically challenged" :D
As fun as it is to learn about such amazing creatures and organisms, it always makes me a little sad to know they're gone...
It is neat to see that those tunnels and such are still around even today, that's a hell of a footprint to leave.
it's amazing that they existed in the first place; i wonder what their defense is? is it only their claws? predators had other priorities? out of reach/too high in the trees?
Well, as long as we remember them, they are never truly gone.
wish i could be that impactful
@@ghostgoth-1Think about the footprint humans will leave behind. Your house will be a much bigger archaeological discovery than a sloth cave one day.
*"THE ATLANTIS SEA SLOTHS"*
Probably the best team of their day.
@General Lee N Knass /knot retired/ *"THE PACIFIC MARINE SLOTHS"* *
I would really like to see the ground digging sloth alive today.
*A R E Y O U S U R E?*
@@supercharged5-39 yeah, they're harmless. Just big, hairy sloths digging literal caves
@@ignaciogimelli1613 I wouldnt mess with a sloth that makes that huge cave lol
@@pedrojioia but it would be cool to see them at a zoo or somethinf
@@ignaciogimelli1613 yep,they are so cool
Im from Patagonia and i have a petrified claw from one of this animals, found it with my dad near a shore!
That's really cool
Fish: Evolve in the sea.
Also fish: Hey, let's go live on the land.
Mammals: Evolve on land.
Also mammals: Hey, let's go live in the sea.
Sloths: I don't like it here. Going back to the land. Later, whales!
Also sloths: Hmm, this is boring to look at. I wonder if it would look better upside down?
Aitch Pea HOW DOES THIS NOT HAVE MORE LIKES?!
🤣🤣
Tardigrades: Mmm, I'm going to space. See ya!
@@shawndavis1480 Tardigrades: Going to the depths of hell. Heard it's warm there.
@@shawndavis1480 Xd
Every time I watch these videos I'm always slightly sad that I will never be able to see the strange ancestors of these creatures in person
One of the biggest evolutionary lessons that I'm learning from watching all these paleontology videos is that bigger is far from better and that too much specialization will eventually mean extinction. I'm starting to think that the common house mouse and the rat will outlive us all.
Well yeah that’s what lived after every extinction along with cockroaches and other small animals able to take a beating
I don’t think there’s anything we can do to stop the mice and rats. That’s more or less what mammals have looked like surviving the last 3 extinctions
That's basically what happened when the dinosaurs get wiped out. The little "mouse-like" mammals thrived and we are their descendants.
Next extinction from a rock from space will do the same to us, and let our mouse and rats survive this "again".
Giant sloth: I am gonna dig myself a home! =D
*14 years later*
I'm finally done. Time to die!
@@syomchi oof
@@syomchi 14 year mortgage? You lucky bastard
r/accidentalbladerunner
Sounds like a human
Metabolic challenge ✔️
Slow movement ✔️
Sleeps majority of its life ✔️
Eats anything that is edible ✔️
I guess i found my ancestors
I already learned something just from the title and thumbnail!
me to :D
I love sloths one of my favorite animals slow and steady
Yea but the aquatic sloths arent the treetop sloths that we tiday its a kinda misleading title
1: they used to live in seas
2: now they live in trees
same
My kiddo is researching sloths for school, and I came across your video. We loved it! He says, "I love the art, the photos, and videos. Thank you!!!
Could you cover the evolution of blood, please?
Btw The episodes just keep getting better and better
Great idea
And it's done
THEY DID
3:13 gotta admit, took me a while to recognize what that was
Why?
Yes the front leg was looking like a dog's head
Omg I didn’t know you watched Eons!
@@keyofallworlds7549 ;)
@@keyofallworlds7549 subscribing to them now thanks
Modern sloths can still swim! I don’t think that’s related to the ocean sloths, but the fact that even modern sloths are so adaptable is kind of mind blowing.
Three toed sloths can but I don't think two toed sloths can.
I like to see an overview of how could it be the normal daily routine of a tribe of humans when the megafauna was around
@Hræð Framhliðinni it's amazing that back then they already used cutlery 😎
@Hræð Framhliðinni Why would humans avoid Megatherium? Megatherium was most likely on the menu.
Still not wise to run into one.
Good idea!
That first response actually captured it pretty well.
I'm sorry I died when he said "metabolically challenged"
who needs clickbait-y titles when you can just tell the truth
4:42; the sea sloth Thalassochus
Now, how was the title click bait?
@@SteviiLove whoosh
@@SteviiLove i think you're both on the same side, but you took Paige's post as an attack on the video, which i don't think it was.
@@SteviiLove i meant that the truth was cool and weird enough that they didnt have to use clickbait. ya get me?
@@fabianjackson6977 welp, apperently no whoosh as OP wasn't ironic
A sloth's bones were found in a cave 300 meters up a cliff. What surprises me, is that it did climb that cliff just before it died
Too much energy
The big flood
Probably was it's home. The sloth may have dwindled there for days.
"Slowths." - Sir David Attenborough
That's the normal British pronunciation
It's also the same as when he says nich/nichs,when it is niche/niches and alge,when it is algae.
Sounds like he says Slavs not sloths.
That's how it's meant to be pronounced. "Sloth" is a deadly sin, not a tree hanging mammal
@@challalla no it isn’t lmao
Megalonyx means large claw in Greek! We have Kentucky Coffee bean trees here that are going extinct because there are no more ground sloths to poop out their seeds, which are toxic to pretty much every other animal. I've got a few seedlings I'm trying to grow, hopefully a few more this year too. Ok thanks for coming to my Ted talk!
The lack of sloths to disperse them can’t be the only reason they’re dying out, if that was the case they’d have been gone long ago
The ground sloths also disperse seeds from ancient avocados in rainforest to Joshua tree seeds in the desert.
Same for cassowary and some of the forest trees in Australia.
The dodo trees going the same way. Trees can live a long time. Avacado seeds are as big as they can be & still be able to pass through giant animal but holes. The reason they survived is being cultivated by ancient man.
Thomas Jefferson gave the fossil sloth remains he saw _Megalonyx_ and told the Lewis & Clark Expedition to look for them still alive.
Being an Australian, I want to learn about the megafauna that used to live here. The Thylacaleo fascinates me. Doing an episode just about them would be more than enough to make me very happy.
Well your wish has been granted multiple times throughout the years, they just dropped a vid on Thylacoleo 4 years later lol.
@@AspireGMD Yeah, it kind of felt like I wished for one, and that wish got granted. I was very happy.
Talking about suspensorial animals reminds me of the Quora question "Has an animal ever evolved to be less intelligent in order to survive?", whose highest voted answer indicated the koala as that animal, and one of the main arguments is that it has the smallest brain-to-body-size ratio of any mammal and also that it eats just eucalyptus, a leaf that in the long term wear out its teeth, leaving it to die by starvation.
Also pandas, who can eat pretty much anything and chose the ONE thing they can't metabolise properly as their main food source.
@@LordofFullmetal ikr we might need to let them go extinct ;-; all the effort for pandas to stay alive when it could be going to others that would be able to actually sustain themselves with a little help
To me, pandas fit that idea.
They’re a herbivore that evolved from a omnivore, with the skull and teeth of a carnivore... meaning it just cut off a huge portion of its diet, to eat something that doesn’t even give them that much energy. Which leads to the very slim mating time they have... to me Pandas are one of the worst modern species, as it feels like they haven’t finished evolving yet.
many pandas are in captivity, so I wonder why people don't attempt to control their diet by removing bamboo and trying to persuade them to eat different things, especially if you can start at birth of a captive panda I would think you can adapt it to eat more nutritious foods.. Do they flat out refuse to eat anything else even if you remove the food they usually eat?
@@dubbingsync I think pandas won't evolve. They can't hunt and can't eat anything.
Omg I watch Crash Course and PBS Eons all the time and when this came up in my playlist I was like "wait a minute... something's amiss" for like 5 minutes until I looked at the video and realized Hank was hosting this. I hope he comes back for more!! Love this guy.
"how sloths went from the seas to the trees" i bet they did it slowly.
I think sloths were the first animal on this show who didn't evolve in completely unpredictable continents. Maybe they're still trying to leave South America.
I would never have asked for sloths, but *wow* was this amazing! Thanks for this!
I'd love to learn about Arctic species, and speculate over what fossils are likely under permafrost, please.
Or Antarctic species!
It's ok - at the current rate of climate change there won't BE any permafrost in a few years.
These tree bois need some pre-workout to really get them going.
10:15 talks about an ice age, shows a picture of Scandinavia. Thanks, I guess...
I absolutely love the music for the intros. It reminds me of being a kid in an aquarium or a new museum exhibit.
Me too this whole channel is like old school discovery channel
Sea Sloths are my new favorite prehistoric animal
I'd like to see an episode about the Burgess Shale deposit and how Charles Walcott misidentified so many of the species he found there, placing many in completely wrong phyla.
My Requests:
American lion
American cheetah
Short-faced bear
The elephant family tree
Giant beaver
Evolution of rhinos
Evolution of lemurs
What, no glyptodonts?
thegreatbutterfly I didn’t list them but sure, glyptodonts are cool
Here we see the American elephant in its natural habitat. It's 4am on Friday, after the great feast, and it's time for the elephants to find nesting materials. Here we see a regional plain, where we're sure to find many elephants stampeding for their nesting materials. This region is called Walmart, named after the pioneer of these regions, Sam Walton.
Don’t forget cetaceans
Kyle Sekenski yeah that’d be nice
I just have to say, one of my favorite things about Eons is how excited you guys get to talk about this stuff. I know you're not jumping around or anything, but you're not trying to feed us a documentary monotone either and that makes it really easy to pay more attention and actually get the most out of your videos.
This is probably my favorite corporate RUclips channel
Same
What great topic. I really didn’t know that sloths are such interesting animals. That’s what I like about this channel. The videos are made very professional, the topics are always interesting, it’s brought in such a way that anyone can understand it and I learn things that I would otherwise never have thought about.
You shoud have more fans... You make greate videos
They do have more fans ;) they are 5+ RUclips channels plus his own personal channel
Agreed! Btw, could you use both the metric system and the American system in your videos? I'm thinking that the reason you don't is because you/your channel wants to get Americans used to using the metric system, BUT I think it might make it even easier for Americans to adapt to the metric system if science videos used both. That way, we'd learn how to "translate" the American system into the metric system in our heads as we watch the videos. What do you think? I've seen it done on a few other science channels and I find it very useful.
@@LadyTanyaNY They did show the feet equivalent on the right bottom of the screen.
Don't forget that the US is only 4 percent of the world population.
@@maan7715 4% of the world population in just one single country, that's a fairly high number!
@@LadyTanyaNY I've heard that in Austraila, they changed their Imperial (American) measurements to match the metric system. So... as you understand 3.78 liters equals a Gallon, but in Austraila, a Gallon is 4 liters. From there the rest seems predictable. A Yard is a meter, a Cup is a 1/4 liter, Pint is 1/2 liter, Quart is a liter, a Mile is 1.5 Kilometers, etc...
They simplified the conversions, and the people were much more willing to accept the change.
I misread the title as from the sea to the streets
Lol!!! I love that! 😂
We in the streets too... #SlothLyfe
Gangsta sloths have taken over
It's hard out here for a Xenarthran.
A hip-hop mermaid comedy
"Their combination of a low-energy diet and suspensorial lifestyle helped protect them from all these threats"
I guess you could say they *hung in there*
The best pbs eons Host ever, period!
Seal evolution sounds really interesting.
Sid the sloth’s family tree.
or rudys
Reminded me of that part in Ice Age when Sid was looking at his primitive ancestors frozen in ice, in separate stages of evolution 🦥
Or Flash,Flash 100 Yard Dash
Yup!
I've now seen sloth videos from the BBC, TierZoo, and Eons. That's a trifecta right there. Attenborough called modern sloths mobile compost heaps. They only survive because they have certain bacteria in their stomach to break down the leaves they eat. I wonder if all the sloth ancestors were also mobile compost heaps.
Adrijana Radosevic yes but it’s not just regular digestion, you don’t see humans digesting those kinds of leaves, or even most other herbivores. It’s like digestion pumped up to 100
I love how steve gets a more interesting thank you every time. You’re the best, steve, thanks for supporting a show I really love in a way I can’t exactly afford to do myself 👍
6:37 where the host mimics "furiously digging" 😆
I think this was my comment that inspired this video! I asked on the last video about sloths and then here it is. Thank you so much! This was so cool to learn about and I can’t wait to see what you cover next! ❤️
"What do you want to learn about?"
I want to learn about various methods for dating different paleontological finds. I believe there are certain limits for some methods, like carbon dating only works for 50-60k years or less. So what other ranges exist for various other methods used when dating multi-million year old fossils? I think an entire video explaining the in-depth fundamentals of dating methodology would be fascinating. How do we know what we know?
almost read that as 'various methods of dating different paleontologists'.
That would also be an interesting video?
"The Bachelor: Paleontology Edition".
@@sexyluvre 12/10 would watch.
Also the different times within the Periods and Epoc.
Sloths used to be overpowered before the devs nerfed them into useless slow tree climbers
Watch tierzoo you’ll be pleasantly surprised
My man
I already seen that video.
good job caption. Now GET BACK TO SHOOTING CLANKERS!!!
Tierzoo FTW!
your right its amazing
I love EON's short and direct documentary style.
I'd love to see more plant stuff! I've seen a lot of videos in my time that detail the general progression of land plants to scaled plants to flowering plants and grasses etc., but something that focuses on one specifically interesting family like this video does for sloths would be really cool!
Your use of "survival of the fittest" at the end of the video underscores the fact that people often don't know what "fittest" really means. Usually the attitude of people toward the modern tree sloth is either one of patronizing sympathy or outright hostile condescension. The fact of its continued existence tells us that "fittest" just means "well adapted to an environment" and that "weak" or "inferior" traits such as low metabolism, slow movement, and (outside the realm of the sloth) altruism can serve to make an organism MORE adapted to its environment rather than less.
In my experience, people who use the phrase "survival of the fittest" usually:
1. Have a limited idea of what "fittest" means;
2. Usually believe that they themselves embody whatever trait is "fittest";
3. Want to be allowed to utilize this trait to their own advantage without external restraint.
In other words, they use it as a rationalization for why their own (rude, unethical, immoral, or illegal: pick one or more) behavior should be unencumbered by societal, ethical, or moral norms. I'm pretty sure that their interpretation is not a strict Darwinist meaning of the phrase.
richard hargrove
--
Don't get even; get odd.
Yep. There's (in my experience) usually some form of overlap between these "fittest survivor" people and the people who insist that Great Warrior archetype is what made humans successful. Rather than, say, functional societies, tool creativity and a very wide range of food sources that allowed us to adapt to vastly different areas and climates.
I believe 'fittest' translates to 'greatest adaptability to prevailing conditions'.
The modern sloth isn't necessarily the fittest of all that ever lived. It just was the most adaptable to modern conditions.
Now that every species has its rise and fall, what about us humans?
Will we ever go extinct? Or will some humans die off on the basis of genome xtics or inability to cope with modern lifestyle? Will some of us at some point stand out as 'fittest'?
fitness means the ability of an individual to survive and reproduce, passing on its genes to offspring (reproductive success)
to be the most fit (or to be the fittest) means to have the highest reproductive success
In order to be the fittest, you have to have traits that will help you survive long enough to reproduce, so the traits are part of it
survival of the fittest means that the most fit individuals survive another day with the ability to reproduce and leave the most copies of itself (in terms of genes) in successive generations
I love this comment haha very astute...😘
Natural Selection is a Pass/Fail course, and the rng is horrible. That’s what people don’t really get
Now that you mention it, I do really wanna know how dogs turned into seals and stuff...
H Ĕ Ł P ? Bears did not dogs
I'm lonely Please help Did you just assume their species?
They were arctoids, not dogs.
Not exactly how evolution works haha
The evolution of sea doggos are still a mystery
Your videos are just the best dose of prehistory! Been following for ages, never disappointed.
Sloths are my favourite animal! I was having a bad day but this video cheered me up. Thank you PBS Eons!
Thanks
next do when dog and cats were one.
according to timetree.org (a website you may end up spending hours on if you're interested in this sort of thing) cats and dogs split about 54 million years ago.
Milky Wayan but who served the divorce papers?
Yes
@@ScionStorm1
Big Bird
Nickelodeon covered that in the 90's.
If I were allowed to name a sloth, anteater or armadillo, I'd name it Frank Xenarthra
That's genius XD
*No pun intended
thats the name of Frank (Flash) the Sloth in Zoomania
A sloth is animal that crawls in the trees
It never runs or pants or bends its knees
It’s slow and lazy and has algae fur
If it tried to speak it could only slur
So if your energy’s at a loss
You might grow up to be a sloth
Did you ever swing on a star...
Third time Lucky In the UK it’s called Zootropolis XD
This was fascinating!! I saw a website once which showed the evolution of the Wales and Dolphins, I'd love to see a video about that. And also a video about lions/cat family tree.
They have a video on whales, if I am not wrong. It is called "when whales walked"
@@robscouto ahh, good to know cheers!! ✌️
Great video. It's so fascinating seeing how these creatures got from what they were to what they are today. The gaps in the fossil record still leave great mysteries - there's so much left to learn!
Sloths always have the happiest look on their faces.
I would never have guessed that sloths would be so fascinating. Very fun!
I love ya Hank Green! Thanks for narrating this gem
I love this channel and Hank’s channel(s) independently and was super surprised to see him here! But also not that surprised lol
One of the best channels on youtube.
Humans 10 Years later : How Sloth went from living in trees to flying in the sky with a giant wings and laser eyes
Damn😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣
How did the sloths dig the caves? Earth bending.....
Those were the Bager-Moles
how about an episode about how the placenta evolved
Good suggestion
Is that you Sid?
No this is patrick
I didn't think I could love them even more.
These videos are awesome for passing the time at work. Thank you for the content 🤘
Hey PBS Eons, could you collab with Tierzoo and make a video to do with the 'history of the meta'? For those of you who don't know, Tierzoo is a RUclips channel that teaches viewers about zoology, prehistory and ecology but they treat it like a video game. So he calls the animals builds and speaks about their 'stats'. A collaboration between these two great channels would be amazing
Thanks for bringing up tierzoo, didnt know it existed and def checking it out!
Well I know what I'm binge watching tonight!
Looks like an interesting channel. Will check that out.
PBS Eons is the Game Wiki, TierZoo is the ultimate streamer
Yes! You should do that
Where are the tee shirts???!! I would buy one in a second. Love this channel and keep these wonderful knowledge treasures coming.
Evolution of Elephants?
Hank, I'm still waiting for an episode that explains which critters left the oceans to become insects and how their wings formed.
Celcius!
I love whoever wrote this script. I also love Hank, of course.
While this is very interesting; I wanna correct a small mistake at 3:34 which states that "if you had a body temp at 35 degrees Celsius, you would be considered hypothermic". This isn't the case; the average body temperature of an adult is ca 37C, but people tend to vary within the range of 38 - 35,5 degrees.
Other than that; great video :D
Could you do a video on the evolution of insects?😍
DeluxXe Trash +
Entomology all the way!!! I’m a big fan of lepidoptera. Moths for the win!
This video about sloths came out just ten days after tierzoo’s video, meaning they were in production at the same time. They tackle the same subject but from very different directions and they draw very different conclusions. Both are a great watch though.
Excellent video. Really good information coming from many fields of science with great narration and easily digestible content. You're my favorite Green brother!
I hope you do some videos on creatures of the Miocene Epoch. The predators of that time were badass!
Notification Squad signing in
Ye
I'd love a video on multituberculate mammals. They were so damn diverse in the Mesozoic and never receive any attention or fanfare.
Yes. YES.
Oh, and also, YES.
This was a great episode! Love prehistoric mammals :)
0:14 Original Earth Benders
Thanks for teaching Toph
Lmao, Hanks voice is soo iconic this video autoplayed and I instantly recognized.
Perhaps one of the saddest casualties of human expansion in the Americas is an animal I'm surprised this video doesn't mention, Megatherium.
The largest species of Megatherium weighed over 9,000 lbs and stood over 15 feet tall upright. It was the largest land animal on South America, and about as large as some of the biggest land mammals ever.
It would be alive today if humans never set foot in the western hemisphere!
honestly meghatherium is an easy one most people know about him but yeah i was hoping him to pop up at some point
I'm pretty sure they died off in the Younger Dryas Event like most other megafauna, and most humans.
Bro animals hunt or kill others to extinction in nature. Stop with that stupid mentality that "we" are the big meanie
@@slappy8941 You are painfully misinformed. The Younger Dryas was a single climactic event in the Americas starting about 20,000 years ago. Megafaunal extinctions happened right around the world, over the course of tens of thousands of years, even continuing today. How on Earth does Younger Dryas explain Australian extinctions 40,000 years before it happened, half a world away?
Younger Dryas is a deus ex machina explanation even for American extinctions. There is no strong evidence linking it to megafaunal demise, since other climate events did not have such enormous impacts, and there are no comparable events in other continents where megafauna also perished.
Human arrival on several continents and islands coincides not with climate events, but megafaunal extinctions, like clockwork.
@@terminator572 You have a poor understanding of how ecosystems, evolution, and extinction work. Rarely, if EVER, does one animal directly hunt another to extinction unless it is newly introduced from a different area. That wouldn't even make sense; why would, for example, wolves live with deer for millions of years, to randomly decide to hunt them to extinction one day? Not how ecology works...
Also what other animal wiped out over 70% of the megafaunal diversity of multiple entire continents? What other animal caused even 1% of the environmental destruction we have? I think your blind anthropocentrism is the truly stupid mentality here.
Another important thing that should be mentioned is we could have had big sloths today if it weren't for the tribes who colonized the Caribbean islands. We had ground sloths in Cuba until around 6,000 years ago, just around the time the first humans arrived on the island, which is definitely no coincidence and wouldn't have been caused by climate changes since the ice age had already ended. Artifacts found in Cuba from these tribes are even believed to be depictions of these sloths that humans lived with. It's very much like how we had mammoths until only 3,000 years ago on islands between Alaska and Russia until humans arrived. This means there were still mammoths when the great pyramids were built. While the cold has preserved the mammoths so well that scientists are trying to revive the species from preserved mammoth genes, tropical climates like in Cuba are just about as horrible for preserving DNA as you can get. While we still have elephants today, our sloths aren't very comparable to the giants we lost.
What about avacados!?
dittbub OMG your right!
Avocados were the food of giant ground sloths!
They only exist today because humans found the tasty and spread their seeds.
Too bad they weren't mentioned.
Also Yucca
Ratchet4647 and humans might have started farming them because they were running out of wild game as big animals like Megatherium were killed off
Great video as always Eons, thanks. Didn't know sloths were so adaptable.
So you’re saying the sloths in the movie ‘Iceage’ never actually existed? I’ve never been more disappointed with our history
Ice age was 12000 years ago
Those sloths were digging real hobbit holes!
Plus hairy toes and eating all day.. youre on to something!!
Anaïs Maybe hobbits are not of primate descent but rather a parallel evolution out of the sloths.
what about sid from ice age huh
Xenarthra is a superorder. The sloth falls into a suborder called Folivora, in the order Pilosa. Just saying, though, and I'm still glad for your content!
I love every single video you guys put out, keep it up👍🏻
This series is great, PBS!