There are six species of sloth alive today. I decided to blog about all of them.
I find all that classification stuff interesting, but if you disagree, you may skip this paragraph. Sloths are mammals (duh) in the superorder Xenarthra, which also includes armadillos and anteaters, and which looks really cool because it starts with an “X.” They’re in the order Pilosa, which they share with the anteaters. The suborder Folivora contains two families of sloths, with six total species: two-toed sloths (2 species in Megalonychidae) and three-toed sloths (4 species in Bradypodidae).
The sorts of sloths that exist today tend towards the small and deceptively cuddly-looking (take a gander at those claws again), but they have some extinct relatives that were more on the megafauna side of things. (See families Megatheriidae, Nothrotheriidae, and Mylodontidae.)
