Florida utility crew accidentally unearths 11,000-year-old giant ground sloth fossil

A utility crew digging a trench in Florida came across a fossilized part of an 11,000-year-old giant ground sloth that was originally named by Thomas Jefferson.

The team in Florida’s Manatee County was excavating to install a waterline when they encountered what they believed was just an ordinary tool buried in the Earth.

“They were digging away and found what they thought was an ordinary tool,” Charlie Hunsicker, the director of Manatee County’s Natural Resources Department, told Fox 13.

The tool turned out to be a fossilized claw from a giant ground sloth, an 800-pound behemoth that lived during the tail end of the Great Ice Age.

“This was a wonderful story of happenstance,” Hunsicker said.

The giant ground sloth was given its scientific name, Megalonyx jeffersonii, by Jefferson, the US’s third president, in 1797 after some fossils belonging to the extinct beast were found in a cave in West Virginia, according to the Sloth Sanctuary.

The ones dubbed by Jefferson are medium-sized compared to other ground sloths, primarily being smaller than the much larger Megatherium, Hunsicker explained.

“When South America and North America joined, those animals migrated up through Texas, Mexico and into the Southeast. All of this was really a tropical jungle and forest at the time,” he told Fox 13.

The largest ground sloths could weigh up to a staggering 8,000 pounds and stand 13 feet tall.

The mammal had a blunt snout and a large jaw riddled with peg-like teeth. It was able to stand on its hind legs on occasion to eat high-up plants but could also shred any enemy with its three sharp claws, according to Sloth Sanctuary.

The Florida fossil was brought to a nearby science and nature museum to be properly preserved and eventually placed on display.

Very few ground sloth fossils have been discovered on the East Coast. The majority are primarily found in states along the Rocky Mountains, bits of the West Coast and even Alaska, according to Sloth Sanctuary.

Recently, fossils have turned up in the least expected places.

In March, an “absolutely massive” footprint likely belonging to an Iguanodon was discovered on a coastal town’s beach in England.

Last June, three tweens found a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil on a hike in North Dakota and even had their journeys later recounted in a documentary.