The Last Word On Nothing

If there’s a landmass that has them, get off of it now. As you’ll learn in this blog post, the last thing you want to do is find yourself trapped in a confined space with sloths, and I consider a continent a confined space.

For starters, the sloth is the only animal listed as one of the 7 deadly sins. Their slowness may come off as apathy, but it is far more insidious. A three-toed sloth crawling on its belly toward you at a max ground speed of 5 feet per minute will make your hair stand on end. The larger species have claws 5 inches long, which you can right now feel sliding around your throat from behind.

Besides that, they just don’t look right. Chinless with pageboy haircuts, they have a distorted human-like appearance, the stuff of nightmares. A little test. Which of these bizarre animal faces do you find most disturbing?

If you didn’t say sloth, you’re lying to yourself.

Their necks are their heads, and their faces are frighteningly, disproportionately small. I get that platypuses are bizarre to look at, but platypuses aren’t real. Sloths are real, and they have an extra neck vertebrae that allows them to turn their neckheads 270 degrees as if out of an alien horror movie.

What appears to have been a drown, bloated sloth whose hair came off was found by kids in a river in Panama. They took pictures of the pale, excessively weird corpse and people assumed it was an alien. The following newscast about this dead, naked sloth will send shivers down your spine.

Not usually territorial, they are nonetheless aggressive when defending their young (a sloth-like sort of aggression that would be terrifying if sped up). According to a cited sloth behavior and ecology fact sheet from the San Diego Zoo, a sloth “charges suspected aggressor, pulls objects to mouth with forearm and bites — sharp teeth are like canines of carnivores.”

The next reality video will shake you to the core. Two women in a cage full of sloths (my god, are you serious?) start calling out for help. Hugging sloths turn into a slowly magnifying problem. This is not funny!

If you want to watch more sloth misanthropy, the videos are out there (Two-Toed Sloth Gets Mad at Me).

You say, at least they’re slow and not especially big. This is where it gets serious. Sloths weren’t always this way. During the Ice Age, some stood one story tall and weighed up to 4 tons. An American Eremotherium eomigrans fossil found in 1991 in a storm sewer retention basin in Wilmington, North Carolina, had a claw core 17 inches long. The visible portion of the claw would have extended 12 inches.

I was recently going through a drawer of prehistoric sloth crap in the basement of the Smithsonian (literally sloth crap) with Kirk Johnson, the museum’s director. The dung had been excavated from a dry cave in the Grand Canyon and radiocarbon dated to about 13,000 years ago. Some pieces were the size of small cantaloupes, still perfectly in tact.

Ground up seeds and grass passed through the elongated intestines, and had been preserved in the cave. I lifted out one of these boluses, it was as light as papier mache. Looking into the dry, tightly packed matrix I imagined the size of the sphincter that could push out a small bowling ball like this.

I thought of the rest of the animal attached to this bolus, the long, curved knife blades of its claws necessary for living in a pantheon of enormous predators (as well as raking leaves out of trees and digging in the ground). I imagined startling it out of a dark hole in the side of the Grand Canyon, its hulk rising from shadows you’d hoped were empty.

“It was not at all slow,” Johnson said. “If you came near one it would slice your face right off.”

Did you hear that? It would slice your face right off!
That’s the director of the Smithsonian talking.

We live on a planet with these things! It’s like being trapped in a cage with them. Sure they’re smaller and less dangerous now, but that just makes them creepier. You can run, but coming at you 5 feet a minute, you can’t hide.

Photos:

First two images: Shutterstock

Pleistocene sloth bolus: me