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
Check this out. :')
Larger animals have a tendency to be very specialized and therefore very susceptible to changes in the environment -- be that a new predator (man), the destruction or limitation of a habitat (through moving ice sheets, for example), or whatnot. Also, the larger the animal, the longer the period between generations and the fewer offspring per generation. Whereas smaller animals reproduce like it's going out of style and have relatively large numbers of offspring per generation, ensuring that at least some will make it regardless of environmental stresses, big critters like elephants have one offspring at a time and take longer to gestate and raise that offspring to reproductive age which increases the chances it won't survive that long.
Not really. During the Carboniferous period the amount of oxygen in the air was quite a bit higher, so there were large insects and ferns but relatively few large vertebrates. During the ages of the dinosaurs, most of the extent critters were actually wolf sized and smaller. Only a relatively small number of species achieved gigantic size. There were large "terror birds" right after the end of the end of that era, but most never got bigger than ostriches and moas. The largest mammal was the Indricotherium, which topped the scales at 20 tonnes, but most of its contemporaries were about the size of modern mammals.
Wonder what all that body armor was designed to repel?
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