The Megatherium (foreground) and glyptodont (background), viewed from the Earth History mezzanine.
Ever since the Museum’s Earth History Gallery opened in the early 1970s, visitors have been struck by the appearance of a giant skeleton near the end of the gallery. Many children (and perhaps more than a few adults) have thought that it is a dinosaur, but it is in fact a mammal from the much more recent past, a replica of the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum.
Megatherium was a huge ground-dwelling creature, distantly related to the modern tree sloths. Ground sloths were a very successful group, with fossils known from many parts of South and North America (including western Canada), but sadly they disappeared in the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, along with other wondrous creatures such as the woolly mammoth and short-faced bear.
There are many different ground sloths known, but Megatherium was the largest, described as “weighing up to eight tons, about as much as an African bull elephant.” It walked on all fours (with a gait similar to that of a giant anteater), but could rise on its hind legs, supported by the huge tail, to browse on the trees that apparently formed the main part of its diet. Our sloth is shown in this sort of pose, though it lacks a tree at present. Although ground sloths lived across both American continents, Megatherium itself is known only from South America.
Our plaster cast of a Megatherium skeleton is, of course, much newer than the Pleistocene. But it is very old in human terms, so remarkably old that it could be considered as an artifact of a long-past scientific age. It is far older than our current Museum building, much older than the first Manitoba Museum that was located in the Winnipeg Auditorium, older than the Manitoba Legislative Building; in fact it is nearly the same age as the Province of Manitoba! The Megatherium and its close colleague the armoured glyptodont have been companions for a century or more, and both arrived at our Museum by a circuitous path.
