Camels roamed freely the boreal forests of Arctic Canada ages ago. Today, Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa published such findings in Nature Communications with Canadian and British scientists. Margaret Munro has the full story.
![Illustration of the High Arctic camel on Ellesmere Island during the Pliocene warm period, about three and a half million years ago. [Credit: Julius Csotonyi/Canadian Museum of Nature]](https://icyseas.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/ancient-camels.jpg)
Illustration of the High Arctic camel on Ellesmere Island during the Pliocene warm period, about three and a half million years ago. [Credit: Julius Csotonyi/Canadian Museum of Nature]
My first impression was that of hoax, but here is what the original science article says in the abstract:
Moreover, we report that these deposits have yielded the first evidence of a High Arctic camel, identified using collagen fingerprinting of a fragmentary fossil limb bone. Camels originated in North America and dispersed to Eurasia via the Bering Isthmus, an ephemeral land bridge linking Alaska and Russia. The results suggest that the evolutionary history of modern camels can be traced back to a lineage of giant camels that was well established in a forested Arctic.
Now, the camel is dead for 3.5 million years. It lived at a time when the earth’s climes, oceans, glaciers, and mountains were all different from what they are today with many ice ages that came and went. Bone fragments of this ancient camel were preserved by ice ages long past and today’s cold and dry desert climate of Ellesmere Island.
Good stuff comes out of Canada, and this includes Rick Mercer’s rant about Scientists in Canada 2013.
Rybczynski, N., Gosse, J., Richard Harington, C., Wogelius, R., Hidy, A., & Buckley, M. (2013). Mid-Pliocene warm-period deposits in the High Arctic yield insight into camel evolution Nature Communications, 4 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2516
Icy Seas 
It is surely worth noting that in times past it was those populations living at the high margins, close to ice, that seemed to have formed the foundations for the strong human populations that followed when the ice retreated.
Rick Mercer may be excessively brave. His paycheck is signed by those he is ranting against. He’s very popular & I hope that’s enough.
Obama’s latest puts American scientists in an interesting position. Obama insists you publicize your findings, Canada insists you get their OK first.How can anyone follow both conditions, assuming that permission isn’t forthcoming from the Canadian side?
Terry