This ancient armadillo was the size of a small car

Source: Washington Post

This ancient armadillo was the size of a small car

By Rachel Feltman February 22 at 1:15 PM

A family of ancient animals called Glyptodonts have long been thought of as giant armadillos, and now scientists have the genetic data to back it up: According to a study published Monday in Current Biology, the long-extinct armored beasts were indeed very closely related to modern armadillos.

Scientists led by Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University and Frédéric Delsu of the French National Centre for Scientific Research analyzed the genome of a Glyptodont called Doedicurus. Doedicurus was one of the largest-known species in the family, growing to be over 13 feet long and weighing some 3,000 pounds or more. The hulking animals featured spiked, club-like tails that they probably used in combat. Unlike modern armadillos, their shells were generally made from one solid piece – they didn't have the articulated armor that makes their modern cousins so roly-poly.

The last Doedicurus died about 11,000 years ago, and the tiny fossil sample analyzed for the study was about 12,000 years old – so extracting DNA, which degrades and gets more contaminated over time, was no small feat.

"Ancient DNA has the potential to solve a number of questions such as phylogenetic position -- or the evolutionary relationship -- of extinct mammals, but it is often extremely difficult to obtain usable DNA from fossil specimens," Poinar explained in a statement. "In this particular case, we used a technical trick to fish out DNA fragments and reconstruct the mitochondrial genome."

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/02/22/this-ancient-armadillo-was-the-size-of-a-small-car/