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Unusual Mammals of South America
Since 1988, John Flynn has led many expeditions to the Andes Mountains of Chile. His team has discovered over 2,000 fossils! They include many unusual mammals found only in South America.
The continent was an isolated island for millions of years, so a unique and diverse group of mammals evolved there. Fossils discovered by many scientists over the past 150 years have revealed armadillos with spiked tail clubs, elephant-sized ground sloths, and tiny hopping marsupials. There was once an array of native hoofed plant-eaters that ranged in size from a rat to a hippo. But all of these are now extinct.
One of their most thrilling finds was the oldest, best-preserved monkey skull from South America. It helped answer a long-standing mystery: whether monkeys in the Americas originated in Asia or Africa. The skull and teeth share many features with African primates. This suggests that its ancestors traveled from Africa to the island of South America, possibly on huge floating "rafts" of vegetation.
