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Updated: June 23, 2025
If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, what do you find in the newest tertiaries? You find the great sloth-like creature, the Megatherium, and the great armadillo, the Glyptodon, and so on.
Sloths and strange birds' nests hung from the trees, while the mosquitos and insects made life almost unendurable. We were covered with carapatas, bruised and torn, and almost eaten up alive with insects. Under the spreading branches of one of the largest trees we came upon an abandoned Indian camp.
Every age has its own specialité in the way of bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians.
The sloths, that have been confined to South America ever since the pliocene period at least, must have taken the same route. How they crossed the mountain streams, and lived when passing over broad prairies, it would be difficult to say. A mile a day would be a rapid rate for these slow travellers, and it would therefore require about forty years for them to arrive at their destination.
I shall go to the white men, and never sing you to sleep any more; and when the little evil spirit misses my voice, he will come and tumble you out of your hammocks, and make you dream of ghosts every night, till you grow as thin as blow-guns, and as stupid as aye-ayes!"* * Two-toed sloths.
The most curious species are the slow lemurs of South India, small tailless nocturnal animals, somewhat resembling sloths in appearance, and almost as deliberate in their movements, except when in the act of seizing their insect prey; the Tarsier, or specter lemur, of the Malay islands, a small, long tailed nocturnal lemur, remarkable for the curious development of the hind feet, which have two of the toes very short, and with sharp claws, while the others have nails, the third toe being exceedingly long and slender, though the thumb is very large, giving the feet a very irregular and outre appearance; and, lastly, the Aye-aye, of Madagascar, the most remarkable of all.
The sloths gave reproachful glances at us for disturbing them, and then began to move away at a speed which an active sailor running up the rigging of a ship could scarcely equal. In a short time, slinging themselves from branch to branch, they had disappeared in the depths of the forest. "Let them go," observed our friend.
To this class also belong the land-monsters of bygone days, whose skeletons you may see in museums: such as the Mammoth, or hairy elephant, found in the British Isles, and also over half the globe; the Mastodon, another elephantine extinct monster, whose remains are found in America; the Woolly Rhinoceros, with two large horns on his face, dug out of the frozen soil of Siberia; the Great Irish Deer, whose antlers measured 9 feet from tip to tip; and Giant Sloths of South America, inhabitating the same region as the Sloths of to-day.
They are then barely distinguishable from the Condylarthra and Creodonta, and seem only recently to have issued from a common ancestor with those groups. In the course of the Tertiary we find them especially in South America, which was cut off from the North and its invading Carnivores during the Eocene and Miocene developed into large sloths, armadilloes, and anteaters.
Some birds, with excellent powers of flight, are nevertheless stationary in their habits, as the secretary falcon and certain other birds of prey; while even such moderate fliers as quails are sometimes known to make very distant migrations. Birds with and without feet adapted for climbing live in trees; so also do monkeys with and without flexible tails, squirrels, sloths, pumas, &c.
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