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A life reconstruction of Thalassocnus in its natural habitat by Oliver Demuth
So...why do animals and plants evolve?
There are many reasons why species need to adapt, for example:
Definition of adaptation:
"the process in which a living thing changes slightly over time to be able to continue to exist in a particular environment..." (Cambridge Dictionary)
Structural adaptations: physical features that help a species survive in their habitat.
Behavioural adaptations: the things that species do in order to survive in their habitat.
Thalassocnus lived 8 million years ago along the coast of what is now Peru. At the time, the habitat was mostly desertic, which is not ideal for large herbivores. So Thalassocnus moved to the waters and adapted to eat marine plants (behavioural adaptation) and slowly developed structural feautures such as growing bigger in size (structural adaptation).
Lestodon, another type of ancient sloth that lived in Argentina was much bigger than modern sloths and weighted as much as a small elephant!
It was most likely the creature that left claw marks in massive caves.
In this case, growing large and evolving strong claws enabled the sloths to make safe burrows. What type of adaptation is it?
There are two types of modern sloths: three-toed and two-toed sloths. They are both suspensorials, meaning that they spend most of their time suspending from trees.
This is an example of behavioural adaptation because sloths have a very slow metabolism which means that they need to preserve energy as much as they can to survive. They have adapted so well to living on trees that modern sloths are not fitted for walking on the ground (fun fact: they come down from the trees once a week to poop).