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Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is awarded $130 million by NASA to build its Orbital Reef space station just weeks.International Space Station is forced to SWERVE to avoid collision with fragment from discarded 1994 US.Meet Ameca: 'World's most advanced' humanoid robot is unveiled in a UK lab with eerily realistic facial.Earth's Black Box: 32ft-long steel monolith in Tasmania will be filled with hard drives documenting our.NASA is monitoring two British adventurers as they attempt to trek 2,500 MILES across the Antarctic in 80.Top Space Force official says China is developing capabilities at 'twice the rate' of the US and warns.Ancient Egyptian elites drank thick porridge-like BEER as part of their rituals and ceremonies 5,800 years.Terrifying images reveal what it's like driving with eye conditions including short sightedness and.China's Yutu 2 rover spots a cube-shaped 'mystery hut' on the far side of the moon - but experts say it's.Next pandemic could be 'more contagious' and 'more lethal' according to inventor of AstraZeneca vaccine as.WhatsApp expands its Disappearing Messages feature with the choice for chats to self-destruct after 24 hours.Migratory birds have evolved to have lighter-coloured feathers to help them keep cool during their arduous.Cannibalistic lancetfish that washed ashore on a San Diego beach is found with a chunk missing from its neck.The only total solar eclipse of 2021 is revealed in stunning photos as it appeared for a few lucky viewers.This offers paleontologists a unique window into the diets of animals, allowing them to determine their 'trophic level' - whether they were plant-eating herbivores, mixed-feeding omnivores, meat-eating carnivores, or specialised marine animal consumers. These nitrogen isotopes are found in food consumed by an animal and are preserved in its body tissues, including hair, fingernails, teeth or bones.īy first analysing the amino-acid nitrogen values in a wide range of modern herbivores and omnivores to identify what eating plant, animals or a mixture would look like, fossils can then be measured to determine the food they consumed. It lived during the Pleistocene epoch, between 1.8 million years and 12,000 years ago.īased on previous research that looked at dental characteristics, jaw biomechanics and preserved excrement from recent fossil species, as well as the fact that most modern sloths only eat plants, it had been thought that Mylodon darwinii was a vegetarian.īut these methods could not reveal with certainty whether an animal might have ingested food that requires little or no preparation and is completely digested, as happens in carcass scavenging or some other kinds of meat-eating.įor that reason, this study used an innovative approach involving nitrogen isotopes locked into specific amino acids - biological compounds that are the building blocks of proteins - within animal body parts, known as 'amino acid compound-specific isotope analysis.' One of these species, known as Mylodon darwinii, is thought to have weighed between 2,200 and 4,400lbs and was nearly 10ft long. However, hundreds of their extinct cousins, some of which were as large as an elephant, roamed ancient landscapes from Alaska to the southern tip of South America. The six living sloth species are all relatively small, plant-eating tree-dwellers that live in the tropical forests of Central and South America. 'Whether they were sporadic scavengers or opportunistic consumers of animal protein can't be determined from our research, but we now have strong evidence contradicting the long-standing presumption that all sloths were obligate herbivores,' said lead author Julia Tejada, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. However, chemical analysis of amino acids preserved in the ancient sloth's hair revealed evidence of animal protein, suggesting they may have been scavengers.
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It had long been thought that Mylodon darwinii, also known as 'Darwin's ground sloth', was a herbivore because the majority of living sloths only eat leaves, fruit and twigs, although some occasionally snack on an insect or bird eggs. Researchers said the gigantic 10ft-long creature was an omnivore that at times consumed meat as well as plants. An extinct ground sloth that lived in South America up to 1.8 million years ago was not a strict vegetarian like most of its living relatives because it likely ate meat, a study has found.
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