The Northern and Southern Maned Sloths may look very similar from the outside, but their genomes reveal different stories: the two species have faced very distinct conditions in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest in the past and confront different conservation threats today. In an article recently published in the journal “Molecular Ecology”, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in partnership with the Brazilian NGO Instituto Tamanduá show that the southern, currently more endangered lineage displays lower genetic diversity than the northern lineage, which however shows a rapid rise in inbreeding in recent decades.