On our trip last summer to
South Carolina visiting our friends the Beckleys, we got to visit the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston which, as small museums go, I was definitely impressed with. They had quite the collection laid out in a very pleasing fashion, the lighting was great, and I definitely recommend stopping by for a visit. They had a very nice assortment of fossils that were either local critters, or animals that had been found nearby and likely would have also been found in the area. I started making this post way back then, and I never got a chance to finish it, so I just wanted to share a few pictures of some of the interesting animals that they had on display.
For me, last summer was the "Summer of the
Giant Ground Sloths." Up until that time, I had only seen a few ground sloth skeletons on display, including the skeleton at
The Living Desert in Palm Desert,
California and a mounted skeleton of a Harlan's ground sloth (
Paramylodon harlani) behind the scenes at the
Denver Museum of Nature and Science. But last summer, I got to see mounted specimens at the Mace Brown Museum, the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, and the American Museum of Natural History. The sloth skeleton above is the mid-sized ground sloth
Glossotherium, from approximately 1.8 MYA during the
Pleistocene Epoch in
Florida. The arm below is from the enormous
Eremotherium, one of the earliest
South American animals that migrated into
North America during the
Great American Interchange, approximately 2.2 MYA. This specimen is thought to be approximately 1.6 MY old, from Florida. That little sign placard next to the arm was probably about 2x3 inches. These
sloths were simply enormous.
I also got my first good look at a bizarre group of bizarre,
dermal-armored animals known as pampatheres. Below, we have the giant
armadillo-like pampathere
Holmesina septentrionalis from the Pleistocene Epoch, between around 2 - 1.5 MYA, also from Florida. According to the signs,
Holmesina is one of the largest pampatheres, and was given its current name by the famous
paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, which can be read by clicking
HERE. Originally,
Holmesina was described as a species of
Glyptodon by Joseph Leidy, who later thought that the animal was actually a type of giant armadillo, but Simpson was able to set the record straight in 1930. This animal is in the same order as the armadillos and the
glyptodonts, and like the other two groups, is completely covered in dermal armor. The second picture shows a close up of that dermal armor on the front legs.
This picture displays the skulls of two
rodents. The one on the left belongs to
Castor canadensis, the North American beaver. The one on the right, however, that is freaking huge, is also from a beaver, just a gigantic extinct beaver. Meet
Castoroides ohioensis, a beaver the size of a
black bear! From what I have been able to find, it is unknown whether
Castoroides built dams like its modern counterpart. What is known is that it was one gigantic enormous beaver.
I also got to see my first fossil
penguin (cast or otherwise) not still surrounded by matrix. This is a cast of the skull of the penguin
Palaeospheniscus, a genus of fossil penguin that was abundant during the
Miocene of South America. Their fossils have been discovered in
Peru and
Argentina, both places where penguins of the genus
Spheniscus, such as the
Magellanic and
Humboldt penguins, are found today.
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