This is an updated version of a story first published on Sept. 24, 2023. The original video can be viewed here .
The stopwatch has long been the symbol of 60 Minutes. But any measure of time is pointless for the subject of our next story: the slow-moving sloth. You might think these distant relatives of the armadillo would make the perfect meal for just about anything faster.
And yet, somehow, sloths have been hanging on in one form or another for 64 million years. To understand this quirky animal, 60 Minutes hung out with a quirky zoologist. Lucy Cooke has been documenting the strange lives of sloths for 15 years.
Cooke was Sharyn Alfonsi's guide on a trip to Costa Rica, where as we first reported in September, scientists are making new discoveries about a creature that's turned "survival of the fittest" upside down.Lucy Cooke: This is an area where there are lots of sloths so we do have that on our side. The first thing we learned about sloths is that it's hard to spot them in the wild.
We were warned to keep our eyes on the ground for poisonous snakes...
as Lucy Cooke scanned the treetops. The sloth is a master of disguise. It blends into the canopy and can easily be mistaken for a tuft of leaves.
Lucy Cooke: They tend to hunker down when it rains...
so making it even harder to see them...
Our luck improved on the beach. Lucy Cooke: Oh-oh! there's one up there. She--she's in the nook of the tree looking a bit like a termite hump.
And she's hunched over, so what we're looking.