By Erin Wayman
The desert’s most iconic creature may be a snow lover at heart. Scientists have unearthed fossils of a giant camel that roamed the Arctic more than 3 million years ago, when the region was warmer than today and blanketed by a boreal forest. The discovery, reported online March 5 in Nature Communications, suggests modern camels probably descended from a cold-dwelling ancestor.
“I’m not surprised you’re finding a camel up there,” says Christine Janis, a paleobiologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was not involved in the discovery. Many camel characteristics, such as long legs for efficient walking and fat-storing humps, may be adaptations to living in environments like the Arctic, where food is sparse and distributed at distant intervals, she says.
A team led by paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa found roughly 30 fragments of a camel’s lower leg bone on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. The researchers estimate the animal’s leg was 29 percent larger than a modern camel’s. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate the beast stood 2.7 meters at its shoulders, Rybczynski says, and weighed up to 900 kilograms.