A fossil of a giant camel that inhabited the High Arctic during the mid-Pliocene warm period has been discovered. It is the most northerly evidence of camels that existed over 3.4 million years ago and gave rise to modern camels.
The mid-Pliocene was a global warm period, preceding the onset of Quaternary glaciations. In this study cosmogenic nuclide dating was used to show that a fossiliferous terrestrial deposit that includes subfossil trees and the northern-most evidence of Pliocene ice wedge casts in Canada’s High Arctic (Ellesmere Island, Nunavut) was deposited during the mid-Pliocene warm period. The age estimates correspond to a general maximum in high latitude mean winter season insolation, consistent with the presence of a rich, boreal-type forest. These deposits also yielded the first evidence of a High Arctic camel, identified using collagen fingerprinting of a fragmentary fossil limb bone. Camels originated in North America and dispersed to Eurasia via the Bering Isthmus, an ephemeral land bridge linking Alaska and Russia. The results suggest that the evolutionary history of modern camels can be traced back to a lineage of giant camels that was well established in a forested Arctic.
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Cover image: Modified image from original publication.
References
Rybczynski, N. et al. Mid-Pliocene warm-period deposits in the high arctic yield insight into camel evolution. Nat. Commun. 4:1550 doi: 10.1038/ncomms2516 (2013).
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