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
You Don’t Lose People. You Return Them | Stoic Philosophy
In the Star Wars prequels, we see the romance between Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and Queen of Naboo Padmé Amidala and how the overly attached Anakin suffers from an extreme fear of losing Padmé. His attachment and fear are so strong that he’s willing to…
10 Productivity Habits for 2021📚👩🏻‍💻 | Med School Diaries 👩🏻‍⚕️
Hi! It’s me, Dre. Today we’re going to talk about 10 habits to incorporate in 2021. So, let’s get started. I’m looking at my iPad, so if I’m looking downwards, I’m just looking for my notes that I made for this video. Okay, so the first one is “me time.”…
Perfect Your Desires
One of the things I’ve learned relatively recently in life is that it’s way more important to perfect your desires if you want to do something than it is to try to do that thing when your desire is not 100%. An example would be like… you know, self-disci…
15 Luxurious Hobbies of the Rich
All right, picture this: you made it to the one percent Club. You’re finally a multi-millionaire, and you don’t have to worry about working a single day in your life ever again. Your money is making more money for you. Life feels less stressed, and you’ve…
Connecting f, f', and f'' graphically (another example) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We have the graph of three functions here, and we’re told that one of them is the function ( f ), one is its first derivative, and then one of them is the second derivative. We just don’t know which one is which. So, like always, pause this video and see …
Alex Honnold Explores Sustainability at Epcot | ourHOME | National Geographic
[Music] Hey, I’m Alex Honald and I’m here at Walt Disney World Resort learning a little bit about what the park has done with solar energy to power the park through solar and also learning about the interplay with nature and the park. [Music] Here, hello…