page_title: Glossotherium
section_title: Diet
hierarchical_section_title: Glossotherium / Palaeobiology / Diet
caption_attribution_description: Español: Esqueleto de un Glosoterio juvenil (Glossotherium robustum) Proviene de excavaciones y afloramientos en las mágenes de ríos y arroyos de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Museo de Ciencias Naturales de La Plata.
context_page_description: Glossotherium was a genus of ground sloth. It was a heavily built animal with a length of about 4 metres snout to tail-tip, a weight estimated at 1,000 kg, and could potentially assume a slight bipedal stance.
context_section_description: Details of Glossotherium’s diet are unclear since no dung deposits are available for analysis. However, based on dental evidence, Glossotherium was likely more suited to grazing, though it was also probably less efficient at ingesting grasses since its dental apparatus was more suited to shearing, which would have been too ineffective at processing plant materials down to an ingestible size to obtain adequate nutritive value. More recent tree sloths have a very slow rate of passage of food through the gut and it is likely that Glossotherium did as well. With a likely low metabolic rate, a large body size, a consequently reduced energy requirement for its weight, and an extraordinarily large gut that likely had a foregut fermentation site, Glossotherium could probably survive better on foods of lower nutritional value than other sloths could. Though it is likely Glossotherium primarily ate grasses, it also probably ate a variety of foliage as well and would be better considered a “browser-grazer” than simply a grazer.
caption: Juvenile G. robustum
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