French
DeutschFile:Ground sloths.jpg
Original file (2,592 × 1,936 pixels, file size: 1.99 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
 | This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. You can help. |
Summary
| Description | Foreground: Megalocnus rodens (left) from the Pleistocene of Cuba and Megalonyx wheatleyi (right) from the Pleistocene of the central and eastern US. Background: Scelidotherium cuvieri (left) and Glossotherium robustus (right) both from the Pleistocene of Argentina with Lestodon armatus behind it (you can see its ribcage), also from the Pleistocene of Argentina and a few surrounding nations. In the The Hall of Primitive Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I like this exhibit. It demonstrates the huge diversity of giant ground sloths in the Pleistocene (2.58 mya to ~11,000 years ago), with highly divergent morphologies and life styles all across the New World. At the end of the Pleistocene however, humans invaded North and South America and everything changed. Suddenly, all ground sloths went extinct. Except of course, Megalocnus rodens of Cuba in the Caribbean, where they remained at least until around ~4,000 years ago. The first known human arrivals onto the island were around 5,000 years ago, long after the colonization of the mainland continents. For some reason these specimens were mounted in the Hall of Primitive Mammals (probably due to a lack of space in the Hall of Advanced Mammals, but it might also be due to the fact that they're xenarthrans, long thought of as basal placentals, although modern molecular data has challenged this view), but this is deceiving. If it were not for the environmental havoc and subsequent mass extinction at the end of the last ice age that humans almost certainly exacerbated, all of these massive beasts would be considered highly advanced megaherbivores of the modern realm. |
| Date | |
| Source |
|
| Author | Dallas Krentzel |
| Camera location |  | View this and other nearby images on: OpenStreetMap |  |
|---|
Licensing
- You are free:
- to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
- to remix – to adapt the work
- Under the following conditions:
- attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
 | This image, originally posted to Flickr, was reviewed on 21 July 2012 by the administrator or reviewer File Upload Bot (Magnus Manske), who confirmed that it was available on Flickr under the stated license on that date. |
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| current | 09:39, 21 July 2012 | | 2,592 × 1,936 (1.99 MB) | File Upload Bot (Magnus Manske) | Transferred from Flickr by User:FunkMonk using flickr2commons |
File usage
Global file usage
The following other wikis use this file:
- Usage on af.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ar.wikipedia.org
- Usage on fa.wikipedia.org
- Usage on id.wikipedia.org
- Usage on it.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ko.wikipedia.org
- Usage on simple.wikipedia.org
- Usage on uk.wikipedia.org
- Usage on www.wikidata.org
