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Mexican fossil ground sloths, a case study for Late Pleistocene megafaunal turnover in the Mexican Corridor

Subject Area Palaeontology
Term from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391831683
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

Ground sloths were a highly diverse group of enigmatic placental mammals of the superorder Xenarthra. Xenarthrans are characterized by additional articulation processes between the vertebral joints, a unique anatomical feature only known in sloths, anteaters, armadillos, glyptodonts and pampatheres. Ground sloths evolved in South America around 60 million years ago and spread to North America and the Antilles during the Late Miocene, i.e. before the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) when the Isthmus of Panama connected North- and South America. Ground sloths belong to the most successful groups of the American Pleistocene megafauna. Nevertheless, more than 90% of all sloth species became extinct during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, with the tree sloth genera Choloepus and Bradypus as the only extant survivors. Current hypotheses suggest that the cause for this selective extinction may have been a combination of rapid climate oscillations and human hunting pressure on the ground sloths, but this remains to be a highly controversial debate.

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