South America's giants
Ground sloths the size of elephants, armoured glyptodonts and last surviving native ungulates share the continent.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.7 million years
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Megatherium reaches six tonnes and browses standing on its hind legs; Glyptodon carries a fused bony carapace over two metres long with a clubbed tail; Toxodon looks like a rhinoceros built from the wrong parts, and Macrauchenia is a long-necked camel-like animal with a nasal opening high on its skull. Darwin collected several of them on the Beagle voyage and could not place them, and ancient protein work only recently showed that the native ungulates were relatives of horses and rhinos.