©Kelly Taylor |
Animal number one is Castoroides. The genus Castoroides has two species, C. leiseyorum and C. ohioensis. Castoroides is a giant beaver. The species are split into a North and a South variant of the genus. Growing to be 8 feet in length this beaver was huge for a rodent! The beavers lived from roughly 1.8 million years ago to approximately 11,000 years ago from Canada down to Florida. The first fossils were found in Ohio in 1837 and 1995 in Florida for each species.
The second animal this week is the North American Giant Camel, or the Camelops genus. Its name means "camel face" in Greek, not very original, and six species have been identified in North America. The most prominently researched, not necessarily most prominently found, seems to be Camelops hesternus. Even though it was a giant camel, it has bee suggested that Camelops may have been more like its South American descendants and cousins and lacked the hump of fat seen in modern camels while at the same time having a coat of multiple colors. In recent years the Arizona desert has yielded some good specimens of Camelops. Camelops lived approximately 3.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago where it died off with many other megafauna during the rise of the Clovis hunting culture.
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