Giant Armadillo Relative Found

Dec. 12, 2007 -- Battling thin air, water shortages and freezing cold temperatures, archaeologists recently unearthed an ancient armored relative of modern armadillos that looked like a Volkswagen Beetle and later evolved into species that were as big as the iconic car.

The newly found mammal, now extinct, weighed in at 200 pounds and once lumbered around northern Chile, where it was found in the Andes at one of the world's highest elevation fossil sites.

"This new 18 million-year-old species is so fascinating because it is one of the earliest and most primitive members of its family -- the armored-shelled glyptodonts -- suggesting that the mid-latitude Andean regions were a center of origin of early diversification for a major group of South American mammals," co-leader of the project, John Flynn, told Discovery News.

Flynn, dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and chairman & Frick curator in the Division of Paleontology at New York's American Museum of Natural History, along with co-leader Darin Croft and colleagues, excavated the gyptodont, which they named Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis.

Croft admitted, "The name of this new species is a mouthful, but it does roll off the tongue nicely!"

Unlike the accordion-resembling shells on today's armadillos, glyptodont shells consisted of mostly immovable plates made from skin bone deposits. Each species seemed to have its own unique shell pattern. P. septentrionalis' shell, for example, was covered with tiny circular bumps. 

Glyptodonts grew larger over time, with some members of the group weighing around two tons. As an early member of this animal group, the recently found Chilean specimen was smaller.

Greg McDonald, a National Park Service paleontologist who did not work on excavation, explained to Discovery News that evolution favored large sizes for the armored mammals for two reasons. First, bigger is better when fighting off predators.