First of please check out Gabriel Ugueto’s artwork. He is an amazing paleoartist that brings to life many obscure taxa one hardly finds quality images of. You can check out his twitter here and his facebook page here
I made a comment on this recent piece he did of two late Pleistocene giant ground sloth taxa that made me pause. People when considering extinct animals typically related it back to something they may already be familiar with. Sabertooth as some sort of large cat, Mammoths are some type of elephant, even an odd-ball like the giraffid Sivatherium can be thought of as some sort of moose-like creature.
For me, I really struggle with imagining the largest of the ground sloths as living breathing animals. For one, their closest living relatives (tree sloths) inhabit such different niches it’s hard to extrapolate behavior from them. No current ecosystem has animals quite like giant ground sloths. Gorillas? Pandas? Perhaps, but even then Megatherium was approaching the size of elephants. Just imaging elephant size pandas or gorillas is strange enough, let alone these extinct beasts.
Were these solitary creatures? Were they social? How were their metabolic rates versus tree sloths? It really breaks my brain to think of a living giant ground sloth.
And yet, for as mysterious as they may be to me, ground sloths died out so recently that for all intents and purposes, they are modern taxa. Many landscapes have living plant taxa that are were shaped by the selective pressures giant ground sloths wrought. These strange animals are geologically and in many ways ecologically speaking are our contemporaries.
Again, like my post on 1884 and deep time conservation, my intimacy with the past informs and shapes my current desires with conservation. I’m lucky to live in a place with taxonomic weirdos. Birds with multi-tools for a beak, arborescent lobelias, damselflies that lay their eggs on land. If these native Hawaiian taxa went extinct, some of them are so novel that it could be difficult to reimagine them as living breathing things. Those brain breaking sloths might be gone, but I will do what I can to make sure these strange Hawaiian plants and animals don’t suffer the same fate. Where one doesn’t have to imagine what they might have been like, one can just visit them and bask in their presence.
Studia Mirabilium 