There are hundreds of colossal tunnels in the north of South America. It is not difficult for people to walk over them. They were not dug by men or women. They were also not formed by the geological process. But their creators left evidence all around, on the walls, floors and ceilings.
Geologists call these tunnels "paleoburrow" and they are believed to have been dug by an extinct species of giant …
Scientists believe these were giant sloths familiar to us.
The term paleoburrow was coined by Heinrich Frank, professor at the Federal University of Hamburg in Brazil. In the early 2000s, I accidentally ran into one of the caves at a construction site in the city of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. Until then, little was known or written about these tunnels in the scientific literature.
Heinrich Frank and other researchers have found more than 1,500 tunnels in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Some of them are over 500 meters long, and the longest has a total length of over 600 meters. Such a tunnel could not be dug by one animal; whole generations and dozens of individuals worked on it.
The big question remains, why did sloths do this? The tunnels are much larger than those needed for any burrowing animal looking for shelter from bad weather or hungry predators. As Frank himself says, “There is no explanation for this behavior - neither predators, nor climate, nor humidity have anything to do with tunnels. I really don't know why they were dug up."
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Frank believes the burrows were dug by a genus of giant land sloths, about the size of modern elephants, that once lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago. They were among the largest land mammals on earth. There were only mammoths more. Others believe that extinct armadillos, which were smaller than giant sloths, dug these burrows.
Regardless of who dug them, the sheer size of the burrow is something Frank and his colleagues are still trying to explain. And these are not simple holes, but with retraction systems. Corridors of different heights and lengths.
The paleoburovs also have a strange geographical distribution. They have only been found in the southern Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. Few have been found in northern Brazil or other South American countries. Even in North America, where giant land Sloths and giant armadillos once lived, no paleocircles have been found.
However, Greg MacDonald, a paleontologist at the Bureau of Land Management, thinks it's only a matter of time before we find them.
“The fact that we don't have them could simply be that we didn't notice them,” he says.
Well, the Americans know how to search. Especially what is not. Like democracy and chemical weapons in the Middle East.
Questions remain with already known holes.
Who built them? Why were they built? How were they built and when?
What's your version?