SANTA CRUZ, CA (KMJ) A group of young students made an important scientific discovery recently when they found an ancient fossilized sloth bone while on a field trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The kids from Tara Redwood School brought the fossil back to their classroom before eventually turning it over to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History for expert examination.
According to Executive Director Felicia Van Stolk, the 20-inch arm bone is the first specimen of an ice-aged beast called the Jefferson ground sloth (Megalonyx) ever found in the area.
There is still considerable scientific debate on what caused the extinction of these ground sloths around 11,000 years ago.
Rendering credit: US National Park Service
The museum plans to exhibit these new fossils, including a newly discovered mastodon tooth, as part of its upcoming Fossil Month exhibit in October.
Megalonyx is an extinct genus of ground sloths of the family Megalonychidae, native to North America. It evolved during the Pliocene Epoch and became extinct at the end of the Late Pleistocene, living from ~5 million to ~13,000 years ago.
