Canadian Camels

That is a little piece of bone lying on the rocky soil of  Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. 

It, and other pieces like it, have led scientists to announce that Camels - the ancestors of the modern day Camels of Africa and the Middle East – got their start in Northern Canada. 

They say Camels originated in North America about 45 million years ago and underwent most of their evolution on this continent before dying off. The testing also showed that the Canadian animals were from the same line of camels that hiked from North America into Asia over the Bering Land Bridge seven to eight million years ago.

Over the years camel bones have been unearthed in Alaska and the Yukon, but this latest find is significant because it is 1,200 kilometers farther north, making it the “first evidence of a High Arctic camel.”

Scientists at Dalhousie University used a sophisticated dating technique to show the Ellesmere bone fragments are about 3.5 million years old.