The largest sloth of all time was the size of an elephant. Known to paleontologists as Eremotherium, the shaggy giant ...

Most people are familiar with modern sloths — slow-moving, tree-dwelling mammals that digest food slowly and descend only ...

Ancient sloths lived in trees, on mountains, in deserts, boreal forests and open savannahs. These differences in habitat are primarily what drove the wide difference in size between sloth species ...

Giant sloths were not your average tree-hangers. These prehistoric relatives of today’s slow-moving sloths weighed up to 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) and could reach heights comparable to a modern ...

So giant ground sloths have high crowned teeth, meaning they ate a variety of plants, grasses, leaves, twigs, things like that. And we can look at some of the hindquarters.

It is a skeleton of Megalonyx jeffersonii, a giant ground sloth, one of four now-extinct species of ground sloth that inhabited North America during the Ice Age. In life it would have weighed ...

For growth that speedy, these giant sloths must have had a strong advantage over their smaller relatives. In each generation, the very biggest must have survived, passing on their ginormous genes.

In 1961, a construction crew found bones while working at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. The bones were 12,700 years old and belonged to a giant sloth.

Giant ground sloths were descended from tree-dwellers, but U-I Professor Emeritus Holmes Semken says there’s no tree that could have held these sloths, as they were the size of wooly mammoths.

Between about 10,000 and 15,000 thousand years ago, it was a very different place, with large animals like mammoths, giant ground sloths and humans leaving ghostly footprints etched in the crusty ...