08/28/2026
Every landscape tells a story. Sometimes, you just have to uncover it. 🦴
West Virginia's state fossil, Megalonyx jeffersoni, offers a fascinating glimpse into the ancient past and reminds us that the places we know today have changed, evolved, and can continue to surprise us.
💬 From the Field
We invited our CEO and paleontologist, Ryan Haupt, to share what makes discoveries like this so meaningful:
"When I first started studying ground sloths, I actually had no idea about their connection to West Virginia. But when I started looking at some of Thomas Jefferson’s manuscripts from the late 1700s, I realized, “Wait a second, that cave may have been in Virginia then, but the border has changed…” and sure enough, the first-discovered ground sloth fossils were found right here in West Virginia! This discovery is so exciting because sloths today are small, tropical, tree-climbers, whereas their extinct relatives were bear-sized or bigger, living all over North and South America with astounding diversity of shapes and sizes.
What I think most people don’t realize is that we can reintroduce animals like elk and river otters to West Virginia because they still survive elsewhere, but there is nothing like a ground sloth alive today. They represent a type of giant herbivore that simply doesn’t exist on the planet anymore since they went extinct. I think that’s what makes fossils like “Jeff” and “Skully” so important; they give us a view into a past ecosystem that we can scarcely imagine (but can learn more about through collecting data), and the more we know about how past ecosystems respond to things like changing climates and human activity, the better we can predict how our own ecosystem might respond to similar pressures in the future."
Science isn't just about finding answers. It's about seeing familiar places in a whole new way.
