This is Throwback Thursday #269. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! email:esconi.info@gmail.com.

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If you’ve been to the Field Museum in the last 100 years or so, you’ve invariably ran into the giant ground sloth Megatherium.  It’s been displayed in a bunch of settings over the years, with its current home in Evolving Planet.  The Field Museum has many photos of its journey from discovery to display.

Excavation in Bolivia (photos courtesy of Elmer S. Riggs)

Men applying plaster jacket to a Megatherium.  Link

Mounted skeletons of Fossil South American Ground Sloth (Scelidodon), Megatherium gallordi composite. Ernest R. Graham Hall (Hall 38). Marshall Field Paleontological Expedition to Bolivia, 1927. Height of erect animal, eight feet; length of burrowing animal, nine feet. This exhibit serves to answer questions, often asked by visitors, as to how paleontologists find fossil skeletons. Link

Megatherium lundi, being mounted prepared by Geology Department preparator Mr. Phil C. Orr in south vertebrate paleontology preparation laboratory, Room 3112. The specimen’s bones are numbered on pieces of paper and arranged accordingly. A mountain type of South American prehistoric ground sloth, Geology specimen P14216 from Gervais and Ameghino Bolivia. Orr working on the pose of a giant ground sloth, during the creation of the exhibit mount for this fossil. Put on display in 1938 in Hall 38, it has since been taken off display and disarticulated.  Link.

More display photos.

Present day display in Evolving Planet

BTW, CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks did a recent segment on giant ground sloths.

Sloths used to be giants the size of bears and even elephants before disappearing around 12,000 years ago. An international group of paleontologists including University of Toronto’s Gerry De Iuliis have assembled a comprehensive family tree of the sloth to understand how a group that used to dominate the landscape was winnowed away to only a handful of relatively small, tree dwelling species. The research was published in the journal Science.