The gentle-clawed herbivores first appeared roughly 35 million years ago in South America but would later perish with other colossal Ice Age mammals such as the mastodons, dire wolves, wooly rhinos, cave lions, and saber-toothed tigers.ĭr. Scientists determined that the earliest and tiniest known species is the Megatherium altiplanicum from Bolivia. Megatheriums are one of a number of giant ground sloth species that thrived in South America in the Early Pliocene epoch roughly 5 million years ago until the end of the Pleistocene epoch 11,700 years ago. One of the largest of these slow-moving ground sloths was the Megalonyx jeffersonii or 'Great Claw' that reached almost 10 feet in height and would surely intimidate ancient human hunters. In prehistoric America, Giant Ice Age ground sloths roamed the wilds, while its descendants are the much smaller tree sloths we know today. It was then shipped to the Muse Nacional de Ciencias in Madrid, where its original skeleton is still on display to this day for public viewing. “It’s an interesting aspect of IU’s history.The Megatherium americanum, or "Great Beasts from America," is one of the first specimens of the colossal mammals first discovered in 1787 by Manuel Torres on the Lujan River, Argentina. “You don’t often hear about large skeletons being thrown out,” she said. Sturgeon hopes the project will bring awareness to an unusual story. Eventually, it will return to Bloomington. The replicated skeleton will be part of a traveling exhibit that will go to all of Indiana’s 92 counties starting in August as part of IU’s 200th anniversary celebration. The IU Office of The Bicentennial funded the project with a $25,000 grant. The combination of cardboard and plastic is intended to be jarring. That process will begin this summer at the IU Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design Makerspace for Art and Design Labs. The rest of the skeleton will be made from laser cut recycled cardboard. Before the giant sloth’s skeleton was discarded, it was sent to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia for a paper published by the Smithsonian Institution, Sturgeon said.Ĭopies of the five remaining bones, along with the animal’s skull, will be made this summer at the IU Wells Library 3D Print Lab. Digital files from those scans will be combined with information about the skeleton’s other bones. Sturgeon and Motz recently went to the state museum to scan the bones to build a replica of the skeleton that has come to be known as megajeff. They were stored in the IU Anthropology Museum, now the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, before going to the Indiana State Museum in the 1980s. “According to some alumni records in the IU archives, they were thrown out a window,” said Polly Root Sturgeon, outreach coordinator at the Indiana Geological and Water Survey.Ī zoology professor named Georg Neumann recovered five of the sloth’s bones from a pile outside Owen Hall. In need of space, the sloth’s skeleton, along with those of a mastodon and a mammoth, were discarded. When Owen died in 1860, his brother, also a state geologist, sold the skeleton to IU, forming the basis of the university’s natural history collection.Įnrollment at IU and universities across the country exploded after World War II. David Dale Owen, Indiana’s first state geologist, found one of the most complete megalonyx jeffersonii skeletons in the 19th century along the banks of the Ohio River.
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