OTTAWA (AP) — Ancient, mummified camel bones dug from the tundra confirm that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in subfreezing forests in what is now Canada’s High Arctic, a scientist said Tuesday.
About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on the island’s west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
“Larch-dominated, lots of wetlands, peat,’’ said Rybczynski, lead author of a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Nearby fossil sites have yielded evidence of ancient bears, horses, deer, badgers and frogs. The average yearly temperature would have been about 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit).
“If you were standing in it and watching the camel, it would have the feel of a boreal-type forest.’’
The Arctic camel was 30 per cent larger than modern camels, she said. Her best guess is it was one-humped.
Although native camels are now only found in Africa and Asia, scientists have long believed the species actually developed in North America and later died out. Camel remains have been previously found in the Yukon.