Ancient Camel Fossil Discovered: Lived in Arctic Before Desert

The desert's most symbolic animal, the camel, actually roamed Canada's High Arctic more than 3 million years ago, when the region was warmer than today and covered by a forest.

Bone fragments belonging to a camel almost a third larger than any living today have been recovered from a remote site in the far north of Canada. The discovery, reported online March 5 in Nature Communications, suggests modern camels probably descended from a cold-dwelling ancestor.

The fossils were found in Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic by Natalia Rybczynski, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. They came from a gravel-rich layer of sediments laid down 3.5 million years ago. Rybcynski said some of these animals crossed a land bridge from what is today Alaska to eastern Siberia-and that meant they were living, even thriving, at latitudes where few mammals can now subsist.

"The camel is an ambassador for climate change," says John Gosse, an earth scientist at Dalhousie University and co-author of the report on the camel published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Considering the proportions of the bone fragments, the camel was a giant, probably about 2.7 meters tall at the shoulder-almost 30 percent larger than its modern relatives are, according to the report.

"Being big was something camels did very well," said Rybczynski, according to NBC News. "An animal today that would be an analogue is the moose - it's huge," she said.

A large body size would have allowed it to regulate its body temperature better during the winters and cover larger distances walking, she explained. Rybczynski and her collaborators described the fossil and its analysis in a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The first fragment of the specimen was found in 2006 and over later visits in 2008 and 2010, Rybczynski and her team assembled a collection of 30 bone fragments that fit together to resemble the tibia of a large ungulate.