Ground Sloth

5/4/18

It’d been a good six months since I last sketched at the Burke Museum. It’s one of my favorite places to while away time when I bring my car in for servicing nearby, but I’d been long overdue (maybe I haven’t gotten my oil changed as often as I should?). At the end of this year, the Burke is going to close for nine months while it moves into its brand new digs right next door. I’m looking forward to eventually seeing all the artifacts that have been hidden in the archives because they don’t have space to exhibit them all in the old facility. In the meantime, I’m going to try to visit more often to get my skeleton fix before the long closure.

I’d seen photos on the Burke’s Instagram account indicating that the mastodon had been taken down for maintenance and replaced by something new. It’s the cast skeleton of an 11,000-year-old ground sloth. I wish another visitor had come by so that I could have included something in my sketch to show the scale (but I had the exhibit nearly to myself that day). Standing about as tall as the mastodon, the sloth has a teeny-tiny head and huge ribcage that make it look insect-like.