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Nearly 27,000 years ago, a huge lazy ground went through an arid and arid landscape in present-day Belize, munching grassy vegetation and searching for water.
A nearby chasm may have promised relief, but the creature probably fell in and never came out.
In 2014, divers discovered the remains of this lazy giant buried in a clay tray in an abyss of 18 meters under water. The researchers were looking for Mayan artifacts that could have been thrown into the ponds, but discovered part of the femur's laziness, a piece of bone in the arm and a big tooth.
Read more: Los Angeles tunnel diggers discover bones of ancient giant laziness
This impressive tooth, 4 inches long and 1 inch wide, was of particular interest to researchers because it revealed new details about what these ancient creatures ate, a new study says. The new tooth analysis revealed that the diet of these sloths varied from season to season, helping them to survive in their hostile environment.
Diving for fossils 70 feet under water
Lazy old men on the ground, officially called Eremotherium laurillardiwere much bigger than today's sloths: they could be up to 20 feet long, 13 feet long and weigh about 14,400 pounds.
They died 14,000 to 10,000 years ago, but the newly discovered tooth belonged to a lazy person who lived 27,000 years ago, according to carbon dating.
At that time, called the last glacial maximum, the glaciers were at their peak, the sea level was low and much of the world – including Belize today – was dry, inhospitable and cold. As water is scarce, sinkholes are a valuable resource for giant sloths and other animals. Today, such chasms are called cenotes.
In 2014, divers looking for Mayan artifacts in one of these cenotes discovered something unexpected: bones of animals.
"It was at that time that they brought me," Business Insider told a paleontologist from the US Bureau of Land Management, Greg McDonald.
McDonald worked as a diver during the expedition to collect the first samples of the sinkhole. He and another diver located the giant sloth tooth during their first dive.
"When we went down for the first time, I thought," Ok, we'll find some stuff, "but it was amazing – there was so much bone there," did -he declares. "I was dazzled,"
McDonald estimated that the chasm was about 200 feet deep, but that the clay tray on which the bones had been found was about 70 feet deep.
"At this depth, the light penetrates enough to the surface to produce an indirect lighting effect," he said. "But we bring lights when we work near samples, because we want to make sure not to break bones."
McDonald thinks that there could be more bones of laziness buried deeper in the hole, but he has already stated that the team already had a lot to do.
"We did not want to remove too many specimens yet," McDonald said. "We hope to be able to go back here a year, if the funds reach us."
Future research will involve returning to the clay board and mapping the location of the remaining fossils, then taking more specimens, he said.
The lazy giants were adaptable to a harsh climate
Jean Larmon, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, analyzed the tooth after its discovery to determine the season during which the last glacial maximum was present.
Larmon, the lead author of the new study, analyzed the remaining tooth tissue in the partially fossilized tooth to learn more about what this lazy person has been consuming over the course of a year.
The results of his team suggest that the diet of old laziness changed between dry and wet seasons. During the dry season, these sloths ate vegetation and woody plants more like scrubland; then, during the rainy season, they would prefer to feed on grasses, shrubs and possibly bromeliad flowers.
"This discovery gives us an idea of the adaptability of these huge lazy ones," Larmon told Business Insider. "They were able to survive a spectacular seasonality, with a dry season of about 9 months and a wet season of 3 months."
This ability to change what they ate from season to season partly explains why these creatures were so prevalent and why they survived so long, according to the study's co-author, Lisa Lucero. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
It's also a clue to the fact that when lazy giants finally died out – some 12,000 years after this lazy one survived – it was probably because of something more than just a change of climate .
"One of these potential factors is the arrival of humans at the scene 12,000 to 13,000 years ago," Lucero said in a press release.
Larmon thinks that the lazy extinction is probably the result of several factors, including human predation and environmental changes related to land use by humans, although the climate has probably also played a role.
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