Rare Find: Extinct Sloth Fossils Discovered In Underwater Cave
May 13, 2016 - Divers made a rare discovery of extinct giant sloths in a Cuba cave. Geographer and National Geographic Grantee Matthew Peros and his team found fossils of three extinct sloth species in an underwater cave near Varadero. Underwater caves with extinct animal remains are extremely rare. Peros hopes to learn more about ancient climate and environment from studying the remains.
Click here to read more about the sloths.
Matthew Peros
Geographer, Bishop’s University
National Geographic Grantee
We don’t know how the sloths ended up in the cave, our working hypothesis is that the sloths entered the cave in order to look for water, and died in those positions. And then what happened was the water level then rose, submerging the sloth remains, preserving them where they’re found today.
The cave, called Cueva La Margarita 1, is located in the province of Matanzas in western Cuba. There’s lots of underwater caves and caverns that were formed when sea levels were lower during the last glacial period. And that became submerged when sea levels rose since that time.
So what was found in the cave are some amazing paleontological remains. The remains of three extinct sloths, we’re not really clear when they went extinct but it was probably four or five thousand years ago. And in addition to the sloths, we’ve also identified a number of speleothems which are cave deposits that provide a very important record of ancient climate and also cave sediments as well which we hope to recover that are going to give us information about the water level history of the cave, which can in turn be linked to sea level changes and also climate change as well.
Sloths went extinct in the Caribbean between four and five thousand years ago, so we expect they’re at least as old as that. They could be as young as about 10,000 years. One of our efforts has been to try and radiocarbon date the sloth remains and unfortunately we haven’t had success of that so far.
Underwater caves with extinct animal remains are extraordinarily rare, from this point of view this is an extremely exciting opportunity to study questions to do with paleontology and questions to do with ancient climate and ancient environment.
