Brazilian paleoburrows?
Aliens, secret military operations or megafauna?
Something a little different today, but something I found really intriguing.
We will be delving (pun intended) into the underground ‘tunnels’ in Brazil that have been found winding beneath the Amazon.
What are they?
I parenthesised the word ‘tunnel’ as while colloquially correct the actual term given to these structures is paleoburrow.
Defined a paleoburrow is an
“burrow formed by an animal of the ancient past.”[1]
Wikipedia goes a little deeper and a better functional definition is that a paleoburrow is
“an underground shelter (tunnel, burrow, lair, etc.) excavated by extinct paleo-vertebrate megafauna (i.e., giant mammals, such as ground sloths) that lived in the prehistoric era.”[2]
Generally, these burrows are small (large compared to their modern equivalent, but nonetheless overall quite small. However, what brings us here today is a particular system of tunnels discovered by Amilcar Adamy a geologist working for Brazilian Geological Survey (known as CPRM [its Portuguese initialisation]) in 2010 and explored in 2015.
