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Megatherium
''Megatherium'' ( from the Greek ''mega'' (), meaning "great", and ''therion'' (), "beast") was a genus of elephant-sized ground sloths endemic to South America that lived from the Middle Pliocene〔 through the end of the Pleistocene.〔A. E. Zurita, A. A. Carlini, G. J. Scillato-Yané and E. P. Tonni. 2004. Mamíferos extintos del Cuaternario de la Provincia del Chaco (Argentina) y su relación con aquéllos del este de la región pampeana y de Chile. ''Revista geológica de Chile'' 31(1):65-87〕 Its size was exceeded by only a few other land mammals, including mammoths and ''Paraceratherium''.
== Discovery ==
The first fossil specimen of ''Megatherium'' was discovered in 1788 by Manuel Torres, on the bank of the Luján River in Argentina. The fossil was shipped to Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid the following year, where it remains. It was reassembled by museum employee Juan Bautista Bru, who also drew the skeleton and some individual bones. Based on Bru's illustrations, comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier determined the relationships and appearance of ''Megatherium''. He published his first paper on the subject in 1796, a transcript of a previous lecture at the French Academy of Sciences. He published on the subject again in 1804; this paper was republished in his book ''Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes''. In his 1796 paper, Cuvier assigned the fossil the scientific name ''Megatherium americanum''.
Cuvier determined that ''Megatherium'' was a sloth, and at first believed that it used its large claws for climbing trees, like modern sloths, although he later changed his hypothesis to support a subterranean lifestyle, with the claws used to dig tunnels.〔
Fossils of ''Megatherium'' and other western megafauna proved popular with the Georgian era public until the discovery of the dinosaurs some decades later. Since the original discovery, numerous other fossil ''Megatherium'' skeletons have been discovered across South America, in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.〔
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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