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 27 ground sloths DHJanzen100689.jpg high resolution
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| While it is a bit unclear just how the artist should render the models of the ground sloths (and see image DHJanzen100688.jpg as well), it is clear that they were big and would have been major seed dispersers for many plants that are still with us today - megafauna fruits, if you will. It is no stretch to envision the ground sloths gobbling up Enterolobium fruits, Guazuma fruits, and Crescentia fruits. However, there would also have been idiosyncratic preferences, just as there are with the surviving megafauna. Cattle, for example, show no interest in Crescentia fruits. It may be a taste thing, or it may be that they cannot get them in their mouths - horses cannot really either, but horses have both their upper and lower front incisors intact, allowing them to essentially pinch the Crescentia fruits open. Cattle lack upper incisors, and may simply not be able to break Crescentia fruits (a horse exerts 400 kilos of pressure or more in breaking a Crescentia fruit). The ground sloths had quite a large enough gape to take a Crescentia fruit fully into their molar mill. | ||
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