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July 19, 2010

What I Learned Today: Camels in North America

I call this: random — Posted by KP @ 8:17 pm

I was just doing preproduction for Hairspray wasting time reading Fark, when I came across this article about some fossils discovered in California, including ancient camels.

I had no idea that camels were known to have lived in North America, but apparently this isn’t the first time remains have been discovered.

Upon further research, Wikipedia states:

Fossil evidence indicates that the ancestors of modern camels evolved in North America during the Palaeogene period (see also Camelops), and later spread to most parts of Asia.

So that made me curious about what exactly the Palaeogene period was, and how the camels might have traveled from North America to Asia. Here’s a picture I found of where the continents are believed to have been located at that time (65.5 – 23.03 million years ago):

Looks like that move would be kind of hard. Did they swim? Did they build boats or airplanes? Blimps? Did the aliens that built the pyramids bring them from North America to Egypt to use as work animals? Because that would be weird if a species capable of interstellar travel needed camels to pull stones. As you can see, this new piece of information that somehow escaped me for 31 years has raised more questions than it has answered.


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