Huge camels like a deviate living for thousands of years longer than once

Some types of megafaune could exist much longer than suggesting the paleontological canon.

The current opinion says that ancient, large animals like ground slots extinct about 11,000 years ago – at the beginning of the Holocene, the current geological epoch. Discovery a 4000-year-old wool mammothHe reported last year, helped to discover in that story. Now it seems that the other megafauna fossil findings from South America are even younger: dating From about 3,500 years agoreported by researchers on February 15 South American Earth Sciences magazine.

Geologist Fábio Faria and carbon colleagues gave eight fragments of megaphaun teeth of different species with two paleontological sites in Brazil. Age two of these teeth – one of the camelids Paleolim Major and the other from the camelid Xenorhinothery Bahiense – He grabbed the team without fear. “With the way out, we wanted to better understand the distribution of an ancient megafaune in South America. What we have found-3.500-year-old is-it is completely unexpected, “says Faria of the Universidade Federal to Rio de Janeiro.

P. Major is an ancient cousin of today’s lamas born of South America. X. BahienseIn the meantime, he had the body of Lama and the nose of Tapir. The new finding suggests that these animals were in contact with humans – who arrived in South America 20,000 and 17,000 years ago – for several thousand years longer than they thought.

Previous studies have noted other megafaun fossils about 6,000 and 5,000 years on the US continent and elsewhere, says Dila Mothé, Paleoecologist from Universidade Federal Do Estado Do Rio de Janeiro who did not participate in the study. But the new finding, he says, “amazes and opens the door to transcribe the history of South America.”

The study adds more evidence to the idea that extinction is rarely homogeneous, Mothé says. As both fossils were found in the same place in northeastern Brazil, Mothé believes that the region could be refuge for the remaining individual species like P. Major and X. Bahiense.

“The environment in the Brazilian intertropic region has been going on until then,” she says. “The open fields were converted to forests, and these animals could have fewer grazing areas and sought refuge in the remaining savani.”

Animal extinction may not have only happened to human activity or climate change, Mothé says. It could be both the mouth of both.

For a person, the discovery is a change in mind. Brazilian researchers once accepted the North American view that megafauna was deleted by surpass. “Following this dominant point of view, we were sure that our megafaun was from the beginning of the Holocene, we did not even go out with our fossils,” he says. Now, “There’s a lot of work to do.”