Signs of a prehistoric camel have been found in the frozen north.
John rode a camel in Egypt a year ago, and my grandson still talks about it, but the camel found in Canada would have looked a little different. (Wikipedia has an image, here.)
Ian Austen writes at the NY Times, “A group of scientists reported on Tuesday that they had found fossilized remains of a giant camel, with a shoulder height of perhaps nine feet, in Canada’s frigid high Arctic.
” ‘It’s a surprise when you first hear it,’ said Natalia Rybczynski, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, who discovered the bone fragments in 2006. ‘But the Arctic in the winter was like a desert at that time.’ …
“The remains were found about 750 miles north of what was previously the northernmost known camel fossil, a giant found in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1913.
“It’s just kind of stunning that it’s more than 1,000 kilometers away,” said Dr. Rybczynski, the lead author of a paper about the camel published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
“She had accompanied a group of scientists to Ellesmere Island, which is in the Nunavut territory, who were studying the climate history of the region. At the time when the oversized camel lived, about 3.5 million years ago, the island was considerably warmer and covered by boreal forest. Still, it had unusually severe winters that lasted about six months, Dr. Rybczynski said.”
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