I have never thought that the camels live anywhere else, except the desert. Well, this speech really surprised me. It is a story about a woman, Natalia Rybczynski, who is a paleobiologist.

On summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degree latitude away from the magnetic north pole (way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra. It was a day of walking with their backpack and GPS and notebook and picking up anything that might be a fossil. At some point, she noticed some kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of her hand lying on the surface.  At the beginning she thought it was just a splinter of wood, but that night, she checked it more closely and realised that it is a preservation thing, looks like bone. 

The next four year, she went to the spot over and over again, and collected about 30 fragments of the exact same bone. Most of them are really tiny.  She tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was difficult. Later, they used a 3D surface scanner. It helped. She discovered that was a leg bone, and specially belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal. But it was much bigger than the cow or sheep. 

She showed one of the fragments to some colleagues in Colorado. They nicked just the edge of it, and there was similar smell which she was familiar with. A year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol. She found a new process that called “collagen fingerprinting”, that each species have slightly different structure of collagen. She shipped one of the fragments and they compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. They found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone belonged to a camel.

A camel, about 30% larger than modern-day camels, would have been about 9 feet tall, weighted around a ton. It was a Giant Arctic camel. Morden camel, e.g. the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia, or Sahara， has a big old hump on its back for storing water for long desert treks. The big, broad feed can help to tromp over sand dunes. So what about this big camel in the High Arctic?

They found as well that camels are actually originally American. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around only in North America, maybe more tan 20 different species. They had different body size, some with really long necks, some functionally like giraffes, some had snouts (like crocodiles)， and early ones would have been small, like rabbits. (rabbit-sized camels?)

And then about 3 to 7 million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas. Another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. Then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct. 

But why it was so North? Even though it was on average 22 oC warmer than now at 3.5 million years ago. But still, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over and would have blizzards. And 24 hours darkness in the winter. How they survived there?

What if that hump, does not contain water, but fat?