Camels may be called the ships of the desert, but ancient,
mummified bones dug from the tundra are confirming that the
animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually
developed in what is now Canada's High Arctic. And those remains
from Ellesmere Island — the most northerly spot to ever yield
camel bones — are also raising important questions about the
future of the warming Arctic. About three-and-a-half-million
years ago, Strathcona Fiord on the island's west-central coast
would have looked a lot more like a northern forest than an
Arctic landscape, said paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski of the
Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. "Larch-dominated, lots of
wetlands, peat," said Rybczynski, lead author of a study
published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Nearby fossil sites
have yielded evidence of ancient bears, horses, deer, badgers
and frogs. The average yearly temperature would have been about
0 C. "If you were standing in it and watching the camel, it
would have the feel of a boreal-type