A ground sloth in Los Angeles

Long-time readers will know I've published many posts documenting reading errors caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. I just experienced another today. Turning a "page" on my electronic copy of David McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, I became aware of the phrase ground sloth on the page even though it wasn't actually there. A second later, I had spotted where that impression had come from:

This unusual in that three lines contributed to the error. We have Los with th directly below it (forming the word sloth, with the s transposed) and just below that is grounds (ground followed by s as in sloth).

An interesting coincidence is that Greystone Mansion, mentioned in close proximity to the phantom ground sloth, is just a few miles from the La Brea Tar Pits, a famous deposit of Pleistocene fossils including more than 70 specimens of giant ground sloth.

Ground sloths at the La Brea Tar Pits, detail of a 1921 mural by Charles R. Knight