Armadillos are nocturnal and tend to hunt at dawn and dusk. These animals have a number of adaptations for capturing prey, such as their sharp claws used to dig invertebrates out of the ground and their long, sticky tongues used to extract ants and termites from the tunnels in their nests. Some species might also supplement their diet with plants, fruits and carrion on occasion.Īrmadillos have poor eyesight, so use their sense of smell to detect prey. However, other species such as the giant armadillo have highly specialist diets consisting primarily of termites. Certain species such as the generalist nine-banded armadillo feed on a variety of prey types and even eat amphibians and reptiles during winter. A six-banded armadillo Ecology and ReproductionĪrmadillos feed mostly on invertebrates including insects and grubs. This, combined with their lack of fat stores, means that armadillos are restricted to living in warm regions and entire populations can be wiped out by a single cold spell. In common with the other two members of the Xenarthra superorder, the sloths and anteaters, armadillos have low body temperatures of 91–97 ☏ (33–36 ☌) and low basal metabolic rates that are only 40 – 60% of that expected for placental mammals of their mass. While some armadillo species have nearly hairless shells, others have long coarse hairs that project from their shells. Armadillos also vary in color, with different species exhibiting brown, black, red, gray, salmon or yellowish coloring. The 21 species of armadillo vary greatly in size, from the pink fairy armadillo that is roughly the size of a chipmunk to the giant armadillo that is the size of a small pig.
Armadillos live in a wide range of habitat types including rainforests, grasslands and semi-deserts.Īrmadillos are characterized by a leathery armor shell that covers the back, head, legs, and tail of most species. One species, the nine-banded armadillo, is also found in the United States as far west as eastern New Mexico and as far north as southern Nebraska. The armadillo is a group of 21 species of armored placental mammal native mainly to tropical and subtropical regions of Central and South America. Wild cats and canids, black bears, raccoons Kramarz estimated the specimen found by Nievas was relatively young at 10,000 years.Species vary from least concern to vulnerable They lived in South America for tens of millions of years. They had big round armored shells and weighed up to a ton. Glyptodonts are the ancestors of modern armadillos. "The animal became extinct thousands of years ago and it is very common to find their fossils in this region," he told AFP. "There is no doubt that it looks like a glyptodont," said paleontologist Alejandro Kramarz of the Bernadino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum. Various experts who saw television pictures of the object said it was likely to be a glyptodont shell. Nievas told television channel Todo Noticias he found the shell partly covered in mud and started to dig around it. "We all laughed because we thought it was a joke." "My husband went out to the car and when he came back he said, 'Hey, I just found an egg that looks like it came from a dinosaur," she said.
Her husband Jose Antonio Nievas found the shell beside a stream at their farm in Carlos Spegazzini, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital Buenos Aires.
A local man thought the black scaly shell was a dinosaur egg when he saw it lying in the mud, his wife Reina Coronel told AFP.
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