What Dug this 10,000 Year old Burrow?

Giant Sloths? Giant Armadillos? They’re called paleoburrows, they’re 10,000 years old, and Brazillian geologist Heinrich Frank and his students are trying to figure out what dug them. Here’s more from Discover Magazine:

Surveying a 45-mile stretch of highway construction near the city of Porto Alegre, for example, Frank and his students identified paleoburrows in more than 70 percent of road cuts. Although many are completely filled with sediment, they remain readily apparent, standing out like dark, round knots in a dirt bank. Others are still open, like the one that first attracted Frank’s attention.

“There’s no geological process in the world that produces long tunnels with a circular or elliptical cross-section, which branch and rise and fall, with claw marks on the walls,” says Frank. “I’ve [also] seen dozens of caves that have inorganic origins, and in these cases, it’s very clear that digging animals had no role in their creation.”

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