How to View Ground Sloth in 3D
Ground Sloth 3D Viewer runs Megatherium - the giant Ice Age ground sloth, a mammal and not a dinosaur - in your browser. Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom, toggle a 1.8 m person for scale, and click a body part for a fossil-sourced fact.
Open the Ground Sloth page and take the camera
Open the Ground Sloth 3D Viewer and wait for the facts panel to fill. When the status line says you can drag, orbit Megatherium with the pointer and zoom with the scroll wheel or a two-finger pinch. Fullscreen expands the wrapper so the controls stay visible beside the scene. After first paint a license-clean glTF may swap in automatically; if that load fails the page stays on the procedural body with zero regression.
Use the four Ground Sloth controls under the canvas
Under the Ground Sloth canvas, four controls handle view and scale:
- Fullscreen - fills the display while keeping the buttons visible
- Stop rotation / Auto-rotate - freezes or resumes auto-spin
- Idle motion - adds subtle breathing and leg sway; tap again for Stand still
- Size vs human - shows a 1.8 m person at the honest length ratio used by the viewer (6 m for M. americanum)
Read the Ground Sloth facts panel and click a body part
The Ground Sloth facts panel lists length about 6 m (20 ft), weight about 3,700-4,000 kg (comparable to an Asian elephant), a selective browser diet of foliage, twigs, and fruit using a black-rhinoceros-like prehensile upper lip - not the long prehensile tongue of older popular depictions - fossil evidence that Megatherium could rise onto its hind legs in a stable tripod stance bracing on its heavy tail, extinction about 12,000 years ago in the end-Pleistocene event, and discovery history - first fossil found in 1787 by Fray Manuel de Torres on the Lujan River bank in what is now Argentina; Georges Cuvier formally described the genus in 1796. A skeleton with cut marks at Campo Laborde, Argentina (dated about 12,600 years ago) is the only confirmed giant-ground-sloth butchery site in the Americas. It is a Pleistocene mammal, unrelated to dinosaurs. A short click - not a drag - on head, body, neck, tail, or leg surfaces a short fossil fact. Procedural fur color is an artistic choice; when the CC-BY 3.0 Poly by Google glTF loads, the status text notes a real model with that credit - a stylized low-poly reconstruction, not a laser scan.
What the Ground Sloth how-to guide is not
The Ground Sloth how-to guide is a controls walkthrough for the in-browser viewer only - it does not place the model in your room (no AR), does not claim Megatherium was a dinosaur, does not claim soft-tissue accuracy for the procedural body, does not invent one precise length or weight beyond the cited about 6 m / 3,700-4,000 kg figures, does not revive the inaccurate long-tongue depiction, does not invent game score or win states, and does not claim the optional glTF is a scientifically exact reconstruction. For the size story see Ground Sloth size comparison. For trade-offs versus phone AR apps see Ground Sloth 3D viewer vs AR apps.
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