Rare Find: Extinct Sloth Fossils Discovered In Underwater Cave | National Geographic

we don’t know how the sloths ended up in
the cave our working hypothesis is that
the sloths entered the cave in order to
lift the water and died in those
positions and then what happened was
water level that rose submerging the
sloth means preserving them where they
were found today the cave called a
margarita one is located in the province
of MU Kansas and western Cuba there’s a
lots of underwater caves and caverns
that were formed when sea levels were
lower during the last glacial period and
that became submerged when sea levels
rose since that time so what was found
in the cave are some amazing
paleontological remains the remains of
three extinct sloths we’re not really
clear when they went extinct but it was
probably four or five thousand years ago
and in addition to the sloths we’ve also
identified a number of Spivey of thems
which are cave deposits that provide a
very important record of ancient climate
and also cave sediments as well which we
hope to recover that are gonna give us
information about the water level
history of the cave which can in turn be
linked to sea level changes and also
climate changes welcome slots well
extinct in the Caribbean between four
and five thousand years ago so we expect
there at least this all to stop they
could be as young as about ten thousand
years one of our efforts has been to try
and radiocarbon date the sloth remains
and unfortunately we haven’t had success
of that so far underwater caves with
extinct animal remains are
extraordinarily rare from this point of
view this is an extremely exciting
opportunity to study questions to do
with paleontology and questions to do
with ancient climate in each environment