In the Amazon rainforests in the country of Colombia, there is a place called Serranía La Lindosa, with rock cliffs decorated in ancient drawings. There are thousands of paintings covering 12 kilometers (8 miles) of rock in an area that has been largely inaccessible.

Team Sloth contacted Jorge Carballo, the man responsible for the idea to declare sloths the national symbol for Costa Rica. Jorge grew surrounded by lush tropical forests and is passionate about nature.

July is always an eventful month for Team Sloth, but we weren’t prepared for what was lurking around the corner this year! Things got off to a good start as we celebrated an important symbolic achievement and a huge milestone for one of our projects.

National symbols are culturally created images to represent the country and preserve collective memories about these icons. Usually, these symbols include national anthems, flags, shields, animals, flowers, trees, national dishes, and languages.

June has been an emotional rollercoaster for Team Sloth. We sadly witnessed some of the most cruel, greedy, and reckless sides of humanity, but we also managed to achieve some fantastic breakthroughs for sloth conservation.

Last year Team Sloth were thrilled to receive an invite to visit the Tortuguero National Park on the Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica.  Tortuguero is renowned as one of the most important turtle nesting sites in the whole world, and in particular, its white sand beaches are a haven for endangered green sea turtles. 

Team Sloth have been the opposite of slothful this month – we have been chasing invisible sloths through the jungle, carrying out emergency surgeries, castrating dogs and we were shamefully outsmarted by a herd of hungry goats. Read on below to learn about our biggest successes and failures this month!

“We believe that human beings are mainly responsible for the extinction of megafauna in South America,” said Luciano Prates and Ivan Perez, CONICET researchers at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of the National University of La Plata, Argentina, and authors of a scientific study on the matter, which is published in the journal Nature communications.

Argentinian scientists used X-rays on a 13,000-year-old sloth skin and discovered thousands of tiny bones on the inside.