--- title: Ice Age: real sabre-tooths, ground sloths, glyptodonts and dodos — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Ice Age: real sabre-tooths, ground sloths, glyptodonts and dodos», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The film Ice Age is a cartoon, but many of its animals really lived: sabre-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Ice Age: real sabre-tooths, ground slo… # Ice Age: real sabre-tooths, ground sloths, glyptodonts and dodos Lesson 131 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/0/) — The film Ice Age is a cartoon, but many of its animals really lived: sabre-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths and armoured glyptodonts. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/1/) — Picture a museum hall with a cat skull whose two fangs are as long as your school ruler: that is Smilodon, the real Diego, and its bones were pulled out of a sticky tar pit. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/2/) — The film mixes things up for fun: a real sabre-tooth would have hunted a young mammoth, not walked beside it, and dodos lived on one warm island far from any ice. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/3/) — The Ice Age was not ice everywhere either: great ice sheets lay over the north, while grassland, forest and desert covered much of the rest of the world. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/4/) — Diego's real kind is Smilodon, an extinct cat whose two upper fangs could be about 28 centimetres long; it was not a tiger but a separate, extinct branch of the cat family. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/5/) — Smilodon could open its jaws about 120 degrees, much wider than a lion, so the long fangs did not get in the way of biting, and its bite was weaker than a lion's because the long fangs could snap on bone. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/6/) — Thousands of Smilodon skeletons were found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles: plant-eaters got stuck in the tar and the hunters that came to eat them got stuck too. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/7/) — Some Smilodon skeletons show healed injuries, so scientists think they may have lived in groups, though this is still argued about. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/8/) — Some ground sloths were enormous: Megatherium was as big as an elephant, stood on its back legs to reach leaves and walked on the sides of its clawed feet. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/9/) — Ground sloths came from South America, spread north when the two Americas joined, and died out over 10,000 years ago, except on a few Caribbean islands where they lasted longer. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/10/) — Scrat is invented, but in 2011 scientists described a tiny long-fanged fossil mammal from about 94 million years ago in South America that reminded them of him. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/11/) — Real squirrels bury nuts and forget many of them, so the nuts grow into new trees. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/12/) — Glyptodonts were armadillo relatives as big as a small car, covered in a bony shell that protected them from hunters such as Smilodon. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/13/) — Dodos were big flightless birds that lived only on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, with no predators and no fear of people, and they died out in the 1600s, about a hundred years after sailors arrived. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/14/) — Woolly rhinos had two horns, a long one at the front and a shorter one behind, and shaggy fur; they were painted in the Chauvet cave in France more than 30,000 years ago. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/131-ice-age-sabre-tooths-ground-sloths-and-scrat/15/) — In the Ice Age so much water was frozen into ice sheets that the sea was much lower, and people could walk from Asia to America over land that is now under the sea. - ← previous: [Ice Age: real woolly mammoths](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/130-ice-age-real-woolly-mammoths/) - next →: [Finding Nemo: real clownfish and sea anemones](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/132-finding-nemo-real-clownfish-and-anemones/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)