South America

Pleistocene ungulate, Macrauchenia. Artist: Caroll.L. Fenton. Source and copyright: Patricia Vickers-Rich.

South American ice age mammals included the mastodon, glyptodonts (enormous armadillo-like animals), various rhinoceros-like and camel-like mammals, the western horse, and Megatherium, a huge ground sloth. Charles Darwin, on HMS Beagle, made a large collection of Pleistocene mammals from this region in 1831-36, although he failed to discover the rich site which has been evocatively named the Great Cave of Ultima Esperanza ('Last Hope') on the west coast of Patagonia. This was explored later in the nineteenth century, and was found to contain a vast number of fossils of Mylodon, a ground sloth which became extinct about 5,000 years ago. Humans arrived in Patagonia about 10,000 years ago, and also occupied the cave, but apparently not at the same time as Mylodon. If human hunting was a cause of the extinction of this animal, it was certainly not immediately after first contact, as has often been postulated for other Pleistocene mammal extinctions in the Americas.