Anyone who reads this regularly will realize fairly quickly that I am a random person. My family and I used to joke that, if I were a superhero, my Superhero name would be Random Factoid Girl and my superpower would be Information Dump (dazes opponents for several rounds). My blog entries will reflect that facet of my personality.
Today's random thinky thoughts are brought to you by the letter S for "sloth". Enjoy :)
Sloths are cute. They also have pretty long claws for their size. Seriously, look at those things:
It's a good thing they're so adorable and lazy or else they'd just be scary with the claws. Now imagine one twenty feet tall.
Megatherium, the giant ground sloth, was 20 feet (6 meters) tall and weighed in at about 8 tons. Those would have been some big honking claws. Scary to think about them running around the back yard but they did coexist with humans for a short while. To put it in perspective, some paleontologists think that they used to chase saber toothed tigers away from their kills. The jury's out on this since they were predominantly herbivores and not everyone's convinced they ever scavenged meat -- still, daunting animals. Yummy ones, too, presumably, considering that they flourished in South America for millions of years only to be extinct within a few thousand years of humans making it to this side of the Pond. I think that's probably the downside of being the biggest bad boy on the block. You can't run and hide very well and hungry hunter/gathers look at you and think "all you can eat buffet". I will not be commenting on what this says about human nature since this is a happy place.
Still, fortunately for lovers of cuteness everywhere, their smaller, more adorable cousins continue to flourish.
Sloth, it's not just a deadly sin any more :)
Megatherium, the giant ground sloth, was 20 feet (6 meters) tall and weighed in at about 8 tons. Those would have been some big honking claws. Scary to think about them running around the back yard but they did coexist with humans for a short while. To put it in perspective, some paleontologists think that they used to chase saber toothed tigers away from their kills. The jury's out on this since they were predominantly herbivores and not everyone's convinced they ever scavenged meat -- still, daunting animals. Yummy ones, too, presumably, considering that they flourished in South America for millions of years only to be extinct within a few thousand years of humans making it to this side of the Pond. I think that's probably the downside of being the biggest bad boy on the block. You can't run and hide very well and hungry hunter/gathers look at you and think "all you can eat buffet". I will not be commenting on what this says about human nature since this is a happy place.
Still, fortunately for lovers of cuteness everywhere, their smaller, more adorable cousins continue to flourish.
Sloth, it's not just a deadly sin any more :)
(Random endnote: according to my sister, the freakiest toes in the animal kingdom undisputedly belong to the chameleon. She swears they're actually the descendents of pets accidentally left on this planet by aliens millions of years ago.)
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