megatherium

American  

[meg-uh-theer-ee-uhm] / ˌmɛg əˈθɪər i əm /

noun

megatheriums, plural megatheria plural

1. any of the genus Megatherium of extinct giant ground sloths of the Pliocene and Pleistocene eras.

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megatherium Scientific  

/ mĕg′ə-thîr′ē-əm /

megatheriums plural

1. A large, extinct ground sloth of the genus Megatherium that lived from the Miocene through the Pleistocene Epochs, primarily in South America. It was as large as an elephant, had long curved claws and teeth only in the sides of its jaws, and ate plants. The megatherium was more closely related to the modern two-toed sloth than to the three-toed sloth.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• megatheria
  plural
• megatheriums
  plural

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

megatherium megatheria megatheriums

Professor Oliver Farrington, also of the Field Museum, found fossilized bones of a fantastic toadlike creature, probably the extinct megatherium, in the state of Bahia, Brazil.

From Time Magazine Archive

The skull belonged to a megatherium, a mammoth version of a sloth.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Possibly they would also be reasonably safe, for the low-roofed hole almost surely still smelt of megatherium, and intruders would recognize the smell—as the men from the attic world could not—and keep their distance.

From The Thing in the Attic by Blish, James Benjamin

Boohoop, boohoop!—yes, six times boohoop does that brazen megatherium blare out, vivid and distinct, above all the other sixty instruments in the orchestra.

From Second Book of Tales by Field, Eugene

Beyond the water wherein the pig-tapirs had found refuge, beyond the lurking-place of the wounded megatherium, came three men, running desperately.

From In the Morning of Time by Roberts, Charles George Douglas, Sir

Little could he imagine our own era's "wasteful megatheria."

From Salon ● Mar. 22, 2023

Surely they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the whole history of mechanical invention.

From The War in the Air by Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)

I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on another.

From Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2 Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2 by Halsey, Francis W. (Francis Whiting)

All over the town manufactories and public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a jungle of houses.

From Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 by Various

Those of the bulk of the mastodons, megatheria, glyptodons, and diprotodons, are uniparous.

From The Romance of Natural History, Second Series by Gosse, Philip Henry

Lastly, in the gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters, megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others.

From Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 1 Great Britain and Ireland, part 1 by Halsey, Francis W. (Francis Whiting)

"If a thousand megatheriums were let loose upon the world, in twenty-four hours they would all be in museums."

From Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876 by Various

"Why, for my part, on the contrary, I should have taken special care to preserve megatheriums and pterodactyles, and all the antediluvian species of which we are unfortunately deprived by his neglect."

From In Search of the Castaways; or the Children of Captain Grant by Verne, Jules

And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than what they dug up did.”

From Whispering Smith by Wyeth, N. C. (Newell Convers)

They came in on the Overland, and I find that the professor has made the long journey on the strength of what I once told him about the megatheriums and things.

From The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush by Lynde, Francis