Chalico

The chalico is a species of modern day chalicothere that is descended from a surviving group of prehistoric chalicotheriums that avoided competition in European islands, only later these island became connected to the mainland and the chalicotheriums adapted to deal with newly arrived predators by breeding faster and more frequently, and by living in larger groups for saftey in numbers. Some groups of chalicotheriums have managed to spread into North America through a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska during the Pliocene, evolving to replace the extinct native American chalicothere species such as Moropus, while at the same time, a land bridge between North and South America formed, allowing groups of chalicotheriums to spread into South America, outcompeting with and causing extinctions of small and medium-sized ground sloths on the mainland South America. They are browsing herbivores that feed on many types of leaves, fruits, nuts, ferns, cycads, horsetails, shrubs, bark, and vines. Depending on a species, chalicos range from the size of a gorilla to the size of the extinct large sivathere (a deer-like giraffid). Chalicos come in about 139 species that live in Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America.