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
Three Awesome High School Science Projects
By the end of this video, one of these three high school seniors will be awarded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their original scientific research. Now, the way this went down was, Regeneron, the sponsor of this video, invited me out to Washi…
Ken Griffin: From Starting a Hedge Fund in His Dorm Room to Billionaire Investor
Which brings me to a quote that describes the ethos of Citadel: “Things may come to those who wait, but only those things left by those who hustle.” Now, here’s what I really love about this quote. Who said this? I went off to Harvard to study economics…
See Antarctica Like Never Before | National Geographic
[Music] I think there’s no place on earth like Antarctica. You can spend days and days and days here without seeing any other human being. It’s just as close as there is to being alone on this planet. It’s just so beautiful, so majestic, so overwhelming. …
How To Invest In 2020 | My Concerns
What’s up guys? It’s Graham here. So let’s attempt to answer the age-old question—a question that’s been unanswered for thousands of years, a question that historians have been pondering since the beginning of time—and that would be: how to invest in 2020…
Your Money Is Losing Value | DO THIS NOW
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So today we gotta have the talk. I understand this might be a bit uncomfortable for somebody to listen to, and it’s not easy for me to talk so openly about this, but everyone needs to learn about this at some point be…
How To Stop Being Lazy
What’s up guys? It’s Graham here. So here’s a problem that pretty much all of us suffer from at one point or another, and that would be laziness. It’s that feeling of literally not wanting to do anything, even though you know you should, for no other reas…