A cooling, drying climate turned sloths into giants – before humans potentially drove the huge animals to extinction. Today’s sloths are small, famously sluggish herbivores that move through the ...

Ancient sloths ranged in size from tiny climbers to ground-dwelling giants. Now, researchers report this body size diversity was largely shaped by sloths’ habitats, and that these animals’ precipitous ...

Pleistocene ground sloths constitute a remarkable and diverse group of xenarthran mammals that thrived across South America during a period of significant climatic and environmental flux. Their fossil ...

Dr. Tim Gaudin, a UC Foundation professor in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Science, is a co-author of a new study on sloth evolution ...

Most people are familiar with modern sloths — slow-moving, tree-dwelling mammals that digest food slowly and descend only occasionally. Their closest living relatives are anteaters and armadillos, a ...

While humans wouldn’t be very happy to find that organisms were growing on their skin, particularly fungi, algae, and insects, it works out pretty well for sloths. Sloths may be hosting entire ...

Long before today's tree-dwelling sloths became icons of leisure, their ancestors roamed the ground as colossal herbivores. Some of these prehistoric giants weighed up to five tonnes and towered over ...