Ancestors

Toot

Written by Jon Sullivan on 2025-01-31 at 04:37

This has got to be the most amazing thing I’ve read this week, Evidence is mounting that large sandstone caves in Amazonian South America, large enough to comfortably walk through and the longest with 1,500 metres of tunnels, were carved out by giant ground sloths. Yes, ground sloths!

“The South American palaeoburrows might be the largest ichnofossils known so far.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00216-x

[#]archeology #palaeontology #MegaFauna #GroundSloth #Brazil #amazon

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Descendants

Written by OliverUv on 2025-01-31 at 07:05

@joncounts lol at that graphic, who is this 0.7m tall person? (I think the graphic was supposed to say 2m, as it is mentioned in the article)

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Written by Jon Sullivan on 2025-01-31 at 09:02

@OliverUv Hah! Yes, that would be a little person. I think instead it's a scale bar, so it's the black line that is 1 metre long.

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Written by Kara Goldfinch on 2025-01-31 at 14:00

@joncounts wow. That's one for Tom Scott.

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Written by Asterisk 🇨🇦 on 2025-01-31 at 20:24

@KaraLG84 @joncounts Too bad he stopped uploading.

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Written by Kara Goldfinch on 2025-01-31 at 23:36

@asterisk @joncounts Yeah. He has a newsletter where he shares sometimes interesting stuff.

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Written by Sean O'Brien on 2025-01-31 at 14:18

@joncounts Fascinating! as we covered in our @bitsontape newsletter, sloth bones were apparently an important fashion statement for ancient people in the Americas. https://bitsontape.com/p/free-privacysafe-social

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Written by Bill Reese on 2025-01-31 at 14:22

@joncounts Rodents of unusual size?

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Written by Jon Sullivan on 2025-01-31 at 23:53

@reesecommabill 😂 Perhaps!

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Written by petes_bread_eqn_xls on 2025-01-31 at 14:28

@joncounts I think they only look giant standing next to a human who’s shorter than 1 meter!

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Written by scorpionic maelstrom ☕️ ♏️ on 2025-01-31 at 16:08

@joncounts did they do cave paintings as well? 😁

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Written by Jon Sullivan on 2025-02-01 at 00:17

@rothko 😄 I'm not sure about paintings but ground sloths definitely did cave scratchings. If you hung a panel of that in a gallery, perhaps some would consider it art.

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Written by resipiscent on 2025-02-03 at 16:41

@joncounts Shai’hulud!

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