Emily Chan
There’s nothing that children love more than spending a day outdoors, digging around, and hunting for different types of bugs. Playing outside is always a beneficial experience for kids, but rarely does it ever result in the making of history.
Earlier this year, a group of elementary school students in California were playing in a creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains when they came across the bone of an ancient sloth.
According to Bryn Evans, a teacher at Tara Redwood School, her students had been building a dam and searching for crawdads.
“They’re just in the mud pulling things out, and then one of them comes up and is like, ‘This isn’t a stick; this is a bone,” Evans recalled.
The bone was brought to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History and was examined by Wayne Thompson, the Paleontology Collections Advisor. He collaborated with fossil sloth experts to identify the species.
The bone was part of the left arm of the prehistoric Jefferson’s ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersoni).
It was found in a sediment deposit dating back to the Ice Age, which meant that it was somewhere between 11,500 and 300,000 years old. The sloth bone was the first reported fossil evidence of the species in the Santa Cruz area.
Jefferson’s ground sloths are large, plant-eating mammals that are now extinct. They weighed between 2,200 and 2,425 pounds and could grow up to three meters in length.
These three-toed sloths walked on all fours, had the ability to stand on their hind legs, and lived in caves for shelter.
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