Camelops lived between 3.6 million and 11,700 years ago and roamed from Alaska to Mexico. However, their fossils have never been found east of the Mississippi River. People sometimes call Camelops, the American camel "the western camel." The American paleontologist Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) first described the species in 1854.
It was seven feet tall at the shoulder and weighed around 1800 pounds. This is slightly larger than the modern dromedaries that stand between 5.5 and 6.5 feet tall and weigh between 660 and 1320 pounds. It had elongated spines on its anterior back which suggest it had a single hump. Previous researchers had concluded that, based on studies, the American camel was more closely related to South American camelids, like the llama, than to the Old World camels.
In 2015, however, a team of US and Canadian researchers led by Peter Heintzman of the University of California Santa Cruz (USSC) analyzed the DNA found in Camelops fossils and compared it to that of living camel species. The researchers found more similarities between the prehistoric camel and the Old World camels than between Camelops and the South American camelids.
The North American camels' features, like its single hump and big eyes, may have originally developed to enable it to survive the cold of the Ice Age. In 2013, a team of scientists led by Natalia Rybczynski from the Canadian Museum of Nature found fossils of large American camels on Ellesmere Island in the northernmost part of Canada. The camels, which had lived 3.5 million years ago but were about 30 percent bigger.
Rybczynski noted that many of the features of present-day dromedaries could have been useful to an Arctic creature. Modern-day camels, for example, have large, flat and wide feet that help them walk on sand. Those same feet could have also helped a North American camel walk on snow. A camel's hump enables it to store fat, so it won't immediately starve if it can't find food. A hump would have enabled the Arctic camel to survive harsh winters during which finding food would have been difficult.
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