ABSTRACT
The giant ground sloth and its diminutive surviving relatives was an indication of the many possibilities of an evolutionary mechanism—without moral or progressive imperatives—that could alter and change species even over relatively short periods of time. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discoveries had revealed a previously unknown group, the Megatheria or giant ground sloths, which roamed the jungles and caves of South and North America in the not-too-distant pleistocene. The discovery of the Megatheria, the sloth's ancestors, proved problematic since the evidence was that these forms were far more active and certainly less slothful than their modern descendants. The ground sloth skeletons that were coming in from South America in the early nineteenth century were, of course, part of a colonial enterprise that was bringing all sorts of new animals into the Victorian frame of mind.
