Camels appear in North America
The camel family originates on the plains of Wyoming, not in any desert.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 5 million years
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Eocene, Cenozoic
Protylopus, a rabbit-sized four-toed browser from the middle Eocene of North America, is the earliest known camelid. The entire subsequent history of the family plays out on that continent — including giraffe-necked forms and giants over three metres tall — before some lineages cross the Bering land bridge into Asia and others the Panama isthmus into South America, becoming the llamas and vicunas. Camels then go extinct in their homeland at the end of the Pleistocene, leaving the misleading impression that they are an Old World animal.