An ancient sloth weighing some 5 tons and sporting claws that extended a foot is helping to reveal how the slow, furry creatures ballooned in size long ago at a startlingly fast rate, a new study finds.
The massive beast, Eremotherium eomigrans, along with all of the sloth's giant predecessors, went extinct by about 11,000 years ago.
The new study found that some sloth lineages grew more than 220 pounds (100 kilograms) every million years — one of the fastest body growth rates known in the evolution of mammals.
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