A Tunnel Dug by a Giant Ground Sloth In Brazil over 10,000 Years Ago

A Tunnel Dug by a Giant Ground Sloth In Brazil over 10,000 Years Ago

I posted this on story this weekend and was one of the most responded to in a while (with a wild variety of responses :), so I wanted to make it a full post. Known as Paleoburrows, these enormous tunnels can measure up to 2,000 feet long and over six feet tall and it's believed that the Brazilian tunnels were created by giant ground sloths. How were they discovered? In the early 2000s, a Professor Heinrich Frank of the University of Rio Grande do Sul was driving by a construction site when something caught his eye. There was a strange hole that had been revealed by the site's excavators, and Frank wondered where it led. A few weeks later he made his way back and entered the hole. Crawling down the 15-foot-long opening, he noticed claw marks across the ceiling of the cave. Given his expertise, he knew that no natural phenomenon would create a cave with those characteristics, and that it must’ve been done by a large animal. The animal would’ve been what’s known as a Megatherium, an extinct genus of ground sloths endemic to South America. Slide 2 is what one may have looked like and Slide 3 are its skeleton. Frank has been able to find and document over 1500 Paleoburrows since his finding. Here are photos:

Source: https://mymodernmet.com/paleoburrow-giant-ground-sloth/

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