Sloths
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — On Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2005, University of Florida ornithologist David Steadman holds the skull of an extinct ground sloth that was uncovered from a cave in Haiti. In the foreground is a much larger sloth skull that was found in Ormond Beach, Fla. The giant skull belonged to an animal that weighed at least three tons and lived about 15,000 years ago, while the smaller sloth, which may have lived in trees as well as on the ground, weighed between 10 and 15 pounds and dates from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Steadman’s finding that prehistoric big game hunters and not the last ice age are the likely culprits in the extinction of giant ground sloths and other North American great mammals is the subject of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Both skulls are now housed in the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.
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