A day of play under the California sun became a historic adventure for a curious group of elementary school students.
On Wednesday, the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History announced it now has a prehistoric left arm bone belonging to a Jefferson sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) after students discovered the bone while playing in a stream in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“They were building a dam, they were looking for grandfathers,” Tara Redwood School teacher Bryn Evans recalled to KSBW. “They’re just in the mud pulling things out, and then one of them comes up and says, ‘This isn’t a stick, this is a bone.’
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Wayne Thompson with a student and a sloth.
Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
The bone was brought to the museum and examined by Paleontology Collections Consultant Wayne Thompson, who worked with sloth fossil experts to determine its provenance.
In addition to being the first reported fossil evidence for the species in Santa Cruz County, it’s a discovery that Felicia Van Stolk, the museum’s executive director, says will “inspire generations.”
“Fossils are a great way to introduce people to the deep past, and we are so excited that students have made this important discovery that will continue to inspire generations of museum visitors and scientists,” Van Stolk said in a statement.
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Giant sloth bone.
Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
According to the museum, Jefferson’s ground sloths were “large herbivorous mammals with blunt snouts” that weighed somewhere between 2,200 and 2,425 lbs. and it could grow up to three meters.
Their name pays tribute to Thomas Jefferson, who presented a paper on the then-unidentified species to the American Philosophical Society in 1797.
The museum estimates the fossil to be between 11,500 and 300,000 years old and will display it in its Art of Nature exhibit from March 23 to May 26.
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Diagram showing where the bone was originally placed.
Mason Schratter
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Ground sloth expert Melissa Macias emphasized the importance, explaining in a statement that “Megalonyx jeffersonii is one of the first fossils documented in North America.”
“It’s just one of those iconic animals that more people should know about,” her statement added.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education