yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Extinct Sloth Fossils Discovered In Underwater Cave | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] We don't know how the sloths ended up in the cave. Our working hypothesis is that the sloth entered the cave in order to look for water, uh, and died in those positions. Then what happened was water level then rose, submerging the sloth remains, preserving them where they were found today.

The cave called Qu Margarita 1 is located in the province of Mananas in Western Cuba. There's lots of underwater caves and caverns that were formed when sea levels were lower during the last glacial period, um, and that became submerged when sea levels rose since that [Music] time.

So what was seen in the cave are some, uh, amazing paleontological remains. The remains of three extinct sloths. We're not really clear when they went extinct, but it was probably four or 5,000 years ago. In addition to the sloths, we've also identified a number of selms, which are cave deposits, um, that provide a very important record of ancient climate and also cave sediments as well, which we hope to recover that are going to give us information about the water level history of the cave.

This can, in turn, be linked to sea level changes and also climate change as well. Sloths went extinct in the Caribbean between 4 and 5,000 years ago, so we expect they're at least as old as that. They could be as, um, young as about 10,000 years.

One of our efforts has been to try and radiocarbon date the sloth remains, and unfortunately, we haven't had success with that so [Music] far. Underwater caves with extinct animal remains are extraordinarily rare. From this point of view, this is an extremely exciting opportunity to study questions related to paleontology and questions related to ancient climate and ancient [Music] environment.

More Articles

View All
Writing equilibrium constant and reaction quotient expressions | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
The equilibrium constant is symbolized by the letter K, and the equilibrium constant tells us about the relative concentrations of reactants and products at equilibrium. Let’s say we have a hypothetical reaction where reactants A and B turn into products…
Everything About Grain Bins (Farmers are Geniuses) - Smarter Every Day 218
Holy cow, there’s a lot going on here! Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Everyday. When you eat today, that’s food going to get to your plate from a field like this, and before it gets in that field, it’s going to pass through the hand and the…
Strategies for multiplying multiples of 10, 100 and 1000
Do in this video is think about multiplying our strategies for multiplying numbers that are expressed in terms of hundreds or thousands or tens. So we see an example right over here: we have 800 times 400. Now, like always, I encourage you to pause this …
Renting vs Buying a Home: What NOBODY Is Telling You
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So the other day, one of my posts on LinkedIn went somewhat viral on Reddit where I said if you were to buy a million-dollar home, you would have to put $200,000 down, take on a mortgage of $5,600 a month, pay another…
How to Build Success by Doing Easy Things (Animation)
This video is a collaboration with Beautiful Science. Be sure to check out their incredible channel after the video. So, if you’re like most people, you’ve had a vision of your potential future self. The more successful, better-groomed, richer, happier v…
Conclusion for a two-sample t test using a confidence interval | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Yuna grows two varieties of pears: bosk and anju. She took a sample of each variety to test if their average caloric contents were significantly different. Here is a summary of her results, or here is a summary of her results, and so they give the same da…