Before the golf, the sloths.

Long before the first tee time, Skidaway Island had a much larger resident. It was a ground sloth, and it was the size of an elephant.

Bones at low tide

In 1823, two Savannah doctors, James Proctor Screven and John C. Habersham, were invited by a plantation owner named Stark to look at fossil bones showing at low tide in a bank beside a tidal pond on his Skidaway property. They took a set of the bones home, and Screven studied them.

Island lore tells it more vividly. A Habersham, rowing out to Skidaway, spotted what he took for a post standing in the water. It was not a post. It was bone.

A giant the size of an elephant

The bones belonged to a giant ground sloth. Screven called it Megatherium, the giant sloth of South America. Today it is considered most likely Eremotherium, its North American relative, a difference scientists did not sort out until 1948. Eremotherium was one of the largest sloths that ever lived, about the size of an elephant and roughly 3 to 5 tons.

A first for North America

The find mattered well beyond the island. It was the first proof that this kind of giant sloth had lived in North America. In 1842 Screven shipped three boxes of the fossils to Washington, and they passed to the Smithsonian. The old tag there still spells it “Skiddaway” Island.

So before the golf, before the bridge, and long before any of us, this island belonged to a giant.

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