Ancient Arctic camel offers climate change clues
Ancient Arctic camel offers climate change clues
By The Canadian Press, cbc.ca
Camels may be called the ships of the desert, but ancient, mummified bones dug from the tundra are confirming that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in what is now Canada's High Arctic.
And those remains from Ellesmere Island the most northerly spot to ever yield camel bones are also raising important questions about the future of the warming Arctic.
About three-and-a-half-million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on the island's west-central coast would have looked a lot 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 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 C.
"If you were standing in it and watching the camel, it would have the feel of a boreal-type forest."
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