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High Arctic camels, like those shown in this illustration, lived on Ellesmere Island during the Pliocene warm period about 3.5 million years ago. (Image: Julius Csotonyi) Camels are the poster animals for the desert, but researchers now have evidence that these shaggy beasts once lived in the Canadian High Arctic. The fossil remains of a 3.5-million-year-old camel were found on Ellesmere Island in Canada's northernmost territory, Nunavut. The camel was about 30 percent bigger than modern camels and was identified using a technique called collagen fingerprinting. The finding, detailed in March 5 in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that...

Camels get their humps from giant ancestors which roamed the Arctic rather than the desert and stored fat on their back to help them survive polar conditions, researchers claim.New fragments of leg bone discovered in the far north of Canada suggest that modern camels are descended from ancestors which lived within the Arctic Circle. Thirty fossilised pieces of a lower leg bone belonging to a camel which lived 3.5 million years ago were found by researchers on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's High Arctic. The giant mammals would likely have measured up to 3.5m (11ft) in height and had one hump...

OTTAWA – Ancient, mummified camel bones dug from the tundra confirm that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in subfreezing forests in what is now Canada's High Arctic, a scientist said Tuesday. About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island's west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.