{"id":305087,"date":"2025-11-21T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/305087\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T12:00:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T12:00:18","slug":"giant-ice-age-era-sloths-ate-cannonball-fruit-over-11000-years-ago-and-you-can-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/305087\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant Ice-Age-Era Sloths Ate “Cannonball Fruit” Over 11,000 Years Ago, And You Can Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWell, why not call it The Big Chill? Or the Nippy Era? I\u2019m just saying, how do we know it\u2019s an Ice Age?\u201d \u201cBecause of all the ice!\u201d That\u2019s the interaction between two Macrauchenia<\/a> that kicks off Ice Age, everybody\u2019s favorite squirrel-led foray into the Pleistocene<\/a>. It touches on an interesting point, really, because although the Ice Age is famous for its ice, Earth still had vast forests, grasslands, and deserts \u2013 landscapes you can see in action in Apple TV’s upcoming Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age.<\/p>\n

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ice is only in the extreme north and the extreme south,\u201d scientific advisor on the series, palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish<\/a>, told IFLScience. \u201cThere are tropical and subtropical and temperate zones throughout the whole of the Ice Age, even at the height of the coldest bits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why, in a show you might reasonably be expecting to see fluffy animals like the woolly mammoth<\/a>, we also get to see a giant ground sloth that is practically hairless. Yes, enter Eremotherium \u2013 an Ice Age giant for whom \u201cgiant\u201d really doesn\u2019t seem to cover it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s an argument as to how hairy they were<\/a>,\u201d says Naish. \u201cWere they thickly furred, or were they naked-skinned, or were they somewhere in between? We had to make a judgment call on that [in the show] based on the evidence that we’re familiar with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ice<\/p>\n

Image credit: Apple TV, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age<\/p>\n

As a recent study starring Yuka the baby mammoth<\/a> demonstrated, we do sometimes get to see exactly what Ice Age animals looked like when they thaw out of the permafrost. Others we have to make educated estimations based on the fossil record, and for some we can get a really good look at because \u2013 as Naish mentioned \u2013 they\u2019re still around today.<\/p>\n

This is true of the bizarre fruit Eremotherium can be seen eating in the series, the very cannonball-like fruit of the cannonball tree. Said to smell a bit like a\u00a0skunk<\/a>, its blueish-white flesh is edible (albeit met with mixed reviews) and eaten to this day where it grows in Central and South America.<\/p>\n

\"cannonball<\/p>\n

Giant ground sloths may have been an important disperser for the cannonball tree.<\/p>\n

Image credit: Wirestock Creators \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ice Age is actually so recent,\u201d said Naish. \u201cIt ended 11,700 years ago. That means that, with a few exceptions, everything alive today is in the Ice Age, including us.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, who\u2019s for some cannonball fruit?<\/p>\n

The five-part series\u00a0Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age<\/a>\u00a0will be available on Apple TV on November 26, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWell, why not call it The Big Chill? Or the Nippy Era? I\u2019m just saying, how do we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-305087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}