Amateur finds ancient fossil in Argentina

[Judi Lynn]

Amateur finds ancient fossil in Argentina

27 Oct 2014 - 2:10 AM UPDATED 5 HOURS AGO


An amateur paleontologist has found the 500,000-year-old fossil of a giant ground sloth while digging in a well on his property in the southern Argentine coastal city of Mar del Plata.

Carlos Manduga accidentally discovered the skull, some vertebrae, ribs and other fossilised remains of the pre-historic creature, a Lorenzo Scaglia Natural History Museum representative said.

"The paleontological remains are about 500,000 years old and are of a scelidotherium leptocephalum, a giant ground sloth," museum director Analia Veron said.

Manduga told museum representatives that he found the fossil while digging and cleaning the well at his house in Mar del Plata, a resort city located about 400 kilometres south of Buenos Aires.

The giant ground sloth had huge claws that it "utilised to dig deep tunnels of more than a metre in diameter and dozens of metres long, creating real underground cities," Veron said.

More:
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/10/27/amateur-finds-ancient-fossil-argentina

[Scootaloo]

1. Well, aren't all fossils ancient?

And the museum director should know better. This isn't a giant ground sloth... it's just a ground sloth. The giant ground sloth - megatherium was a different beastie. Scelidotherium was about the size and shape of a black bear... but substantially heavier, due to bone mass, its hide (which if it was like other ground sloth, had ossified nodules, bony bumps that worked like armor beneath the dermis)

Huh. Brings m to wondering if some sort of ground sloth may have been ancestral to armadillos. They're both edentates, aftr all, and here we have a sloth that apparently burrowed underground.