Posted on 05/19/2005 11:42:50 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Ice Age armadillos the size of cars, fossil shows
Builders have found the fossil of a giant armadillo, which lived up to 2 million years ago and would have been the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, in southern Peru.
"They were carrying out work inside a private home and stumbled upon this surprise during the digging," Pedro Luna, an archaeologist from the National Institute of Culture, said.
The armadillo order first evolved around 50 million years ago in South America.
The type found in Cusco was a glyptodon, one of the biggest ancient armadillos from the Ice Ages.
"It was an animal that appeared 2 million years before Christ and would have died out 10,000 to 15,000 years BC because of a freeze," Mr Luna said.
He said the fossil was "almost complete" and was two metres long including the tail, 1.1 metres wide and with an average height of almost one metre.
He said the animal would have been the size of "a Volkswagen".
Mr Luna said it was the fifth such fossil found since 1998 in Cusco, proving that there was a large lake and valley in the area with lush vegetation. Armadillos are herbivores.
The glyptodon, which means "carved tooth", had short legs with clawed toes, a dome-shaped bony shell composed of plates measuring one to seven centimetres thick, rings of bony armour on its tail and armour on its head.
-Reuters
Ping!
Imagine how big the armadillo's car was then.
Sounds like something out of Hunter Thompson's acid trips.
Brother.... can you imagine if THIS
had been let loose in the barracks? ;-)
Hmmm. Use long tree limbs to flip it on its back. Once it has been turned turtle, build a fire around it, and cook it in its own bowl.
Crude, but my umpteenth great ancestors didn't need to worry about the HSUS or PETA nearly as much as they did about staying alive and keeping the belly full, so they could produce the culmination of creation, me.
Can you imagine these things lying around dead in th middle of the road?
There's a dead glyptodon in the middle of the road and it's stinkin' to high, high Heaven....
I've run across several glyptodont skeletons in museums. The critters aren't the size of a VW, but they weigh about the same (800 kg).
Relatively speaking, these animals are not that big. We have larger critters even today. A lot of folks think, for example, that mammoths were huge, but they were actually about the size of a modern elephant (7 tonnes vs. 5-6 tonnes). Mastodons were a little smaller. The really big ground sloths massed about 7 tonnes. There were few, if any predators that could touch an animals this size until humans came along.
| armadillos the size of cars
|
How'd they do THAT?
The other less-than-white meat.
I could see only the smaller animals surviving due to their ability to hide etc...if man were around at the time, but everything I've read says that man was not around to interact with prehistoric animals.
Yes we do have a few very large mammals around now but it would appear that at least sometime in the worlds history there were many very large animals around.
If it were and abundant food supply and a lack of a dominant predator then it would follow that the average man in a million years or so would be huge. Everything I hear about prehistoric times was very large including plant life. So I still wonder why things were so damn big.
Do you know why God made Armadillos?
So Texans could have Possum on the half-shell.
Giant armadillo loose in the barracks snuffling around the boots and shoving bunks out of the way, yes I can imagine it.
*yikes!*
If it could squeak and jump that would make the whole mental image much worse.
Thanks for the ping!
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Simple. Bigger SUV's.