North American camels: not the run-of-the-mill Christmas camels

In North America and Europe, camels generally keep a low profile except for December, when they show up as part of Christmas iconography: the Three Wise Men, Nativity scenes, etc. The general scarcity of camels in these landmasses makes them exotic. Camels and llamas today evoke specific areas: camels bring to mind deserts from north Africa into central Asia, and llamas are shorthand for the Andes. However, camelids (including camels, llamas, alpacas, and so forth) are actually a North American innovation, circa middle Eocene. Through no particular fault of their own, there are now no longer any native camel species in North America, although as recently as the late Pleistocene, about 126,000 to 11,700 years ago, camels were common. The two flagship models at this time were Camelops hesternus, which translates to the evocative "yesterday's camel", and Hemiauchenia macrocephalus, also known as the "North American llama". The exact taxonomy, of course, is somewhat more bushy when you get into it, but this isn't bad for broad strokes. The camel family filled a number of niches in North America over the Cenozoic, from what we would recognize as roles similar to modern camels and llamas, to giraffe analogues like Aeypcamelus, to plus-sized forms like Megacamelus and Titanotylopus, to analogues of deer and gazelle, such as Poebrotherium (also of note as the first fossil organism named from the White River Badlands; Prout's "Palaeotherium" doesn't count because he didn't actually name it). Here are a couple of examples from the now-vanished North American empire of camels: