Ice-Age Giant Sloths Died in Pit of Own Poop

During the Ice Age, a group of giant ground sloths died together after swallowing their own feces in a contaminated pool of shallow water.

Scientists discovered the bones of nearly two dozen ground sloths (Eremotherium laurillardi) in a pit at a fossil-rich site called Tanque Loma in southwestern Ecuador. The bone bed dates to the end of the Pleistocene epoch (around 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and holds thousands of bones from large mammals.

The condition of the sloth bones and their arrangement relative to each other hinted that the animals died around the same time, the scientists wrote in a new study. And preserved vegetation helped the researchers piece together a grim picture of a marshy watering hole saturated with sloth poo, that sickened and killed the sloths that gathered there, the researchers reported.