More than 11,000 years ago, young children trekking with their families through what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico discovered the stuff of childhood dreams: muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth.
The finding shows that children living in North America during the Pleistocene epoch liked a good splash."All kids like to play with muddy puddles, which is essentially what it is," Matthew Bennett, a professor of environmental and geographical sciences at Bournemouth University in the U.K. who is studying the trackway, told Live Science.
He found that there were more than 30 footprints crisscrossing the sloth trackway, likely from children between the ages of 5 and 8 years old, Bennett said. Each of the giant ground sloth footprints measures nearly 16 inches long, and the beast would have been anywhere from the size of a cow to as big as a bear, Bennet said. The footprints are shallow, about 1.2 inches deep, but it seems that was deep enough for them to fill with water and intrigue the children.