Animals - Wildlife at Evergreen

The Beaver

Giant Beaver Tooth

• The oldest giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) fossil ever found in Canada was found right on site at the North Slope – a tooth. 
• The giant beaver weighed up to 200 kg (440 lbs) and was as long as 2.5 meters long (about 8 times the modern beaver)!
• The tooth looks very different from that of a modern beaver as it is heavily ridged.
• It is unknown if they built dams like the ones that we are familiar with, however, some First Nations recount stories of giant beavers helping a creator shape the landscape into mountains and valleys.
• The tooth, as well as many other fossils from the site, are housed at the ROM.    Source:  Weekly Volunteer Newsletter - Wed July 23 2012

“The beaver and the giant beaver have a common heritage back 20 million years ago or so, maybe deeper in time,” says Kevin Seymour, the Royal Ontario Museum’s assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology. “Those two lineages diverged a long time ago.” This means it’s possible that the giant beaver—which grew to fully twice the size of its surviving relative—may have been a beaver in name only. There is no evidence, for instance, to suggest that it built dams. It’s possible that it looked and behaved more like a giant muskrat.

“The common name skews our conception of what [the giant beaver] was like,” Seymour says. “We don’t have direct evidence that they had a big tail like a beaver. They had the basic big incisor and the chewing mechanism, but they may have not used it in the same way as a beaver does today.” 

Source:   Article:  Prehistoric Toronto: The Ice Age 

See:

Weston Family Quarry Garden

Photographs - Return of Wild Life at the Quarry