Botany/Paleontology: Like Avocados? Thank This Giant Extinct Sloth

Atlas Obscura said:

LAST DECEMBER, SOCIAL MEDIA BUZZED with a new food innovation: seedless avocados. Available only in a few British supermarkets, they supposedly prevent “avocado hand.” This surprisingly common injury, from knife slippage while prying out avocado seeds, can cause serious nerve and tendon damage. But if we all had digestive systems like the ancient, extinct lestodon, we wouldn’t have this pesky problem. That’s because lestodons could eat avocado pits, which is the only reason we have avocados at all.

Lestodons might sound like toothy, scaly dinosaurs. But these Cenozoic-era creatures were sloths, the direct ancestors of the ones still around today. Lestodons were much, much larger than your typical sloth; they put the “mega” in “megafauna.” Weighing from two to four tons, lestodons, along with other “ground sloths,” roamed grassy plains in South America. Their diet consisted of grass and foliage. But they occasionally ate a more nutritious treat: the early avocado.

Giant sloths, along with megafauna like gomphotheres and glyptodons, feasted on whole avocados and spread their seeds over South America. These enormous creatures’ digestive systems could process large seeds, and avocados benefited. When pooped out, far from their parent trees, the seeds could sprout and grow without competition for water and sunlight. It was a good deal all around, and it likely resulted in avocados as we know them: fatty and large-pitted, all the better to attract huge sloths.

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