Typically, either human engineers or rushing water create tunnels. However, there are car-drivable tunnels close to the Brazilian town of Novo Hamburgo built by ancient, huge sloths rather than either.
No known geologic process can explain how the enormous burrows arrived at their current location, and their age is estimated to be between 8 and 10,000 years. Thankfully, a brief peek at the tunnels’ walls immediately restates the riddle: huge claw marks cover their walls and ceilings. The primary suspect in the formation of these paleoburrows is ancient, enormous sloths.
These constructions have been around since at least the 1930s, but at the beginning, they were attributed to the work of prehistoric humans. Before 2010, nobody gave them any thought. At that time, Amilcar Adamy, a geologist with the Brazilian Geological Survey, decided to look into reports of a specific cave in the northwestern state of Rondonia. It turned out to be the biggest paleoburrow in the nation, being more than twice as big as the next biggest one. He meticulously inspected the cave to ascertain the geological process that produced it, but in the end, he was forced to concede that it didn’t appear natural at all.
Image credits Amilcar Adamy.
Image credits Amilcar Adamy.
Image credits Amilcar Adamy.
Image credits Amilcar Adamy.
A similar cave was discovered by Heinrich Frank, a professor at the Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande, while he was visiting a building site close to the city of Novo Hamburgo at the southernmost point of the nation. Like others perplexed by the structures, Frank and his team of scientists examined the cave and later found 1,500 additional such tunnels in the Rio Grande do Sul region alone.
Frank said at Discover, “I didn’t know palaeoburrows existed.”
Even though I teach geology, I had never heard of them.
No geological mechanism exists to create long tunnels with a round or elliptical cross-section, branches rising and falling, and claw marks on the walls.
However, in the meanwhile, researchers have concluded that the burrows were either excavated by enormous ground sloths that existed around 10,000 years ago and were roughly the size of an African elephant or by now-extinct armadillos that would have collaborated in teams to dig. They do, however, all concur that these objects are enormous. Most of the larger burrows that Frank’s team found are hundreds of feet long and split out in different ways. The largest is between 3 and 5 feet broad and over 2,000 feet (600 meters) long. It is also 6 feet (approximately 1.5 meters) tall. The animals had to remove 4,000 metric tons of soil to make just this one hole.
This indicates that the enormous sloths were responsible for creating the tunnels, combined with the recognizable claw traces they left on the walls. The research estimates that despite this, multiple generations of the monsters labored relentlessly to dig this enormous hole, given the massive amount of labor necessary to develop them.
In southern Brazil’s Rio Grande and Santa Catarina states, the bulk of these paleoburrows has been discovered. The northern regions of Brazil and other South American nations have recently yielded any. Because of this, it might be assumed that the ground sloth species that excavated these tunnels had a rather constrained range.
Of course, there may also be burrows elsewhere, and we’ve yet to discover them.
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