The tail of a giant armadillo 700,000 years ago was discovered in Argentina

Buenos Aires. The San Pedro Paleontological Museum, located in the province of Buenos Aires, has a new piece of great historical value, a fossilized tail of a huge armadillo that lived at the end of the Ensenada era, more than 700,000 years ago.

The discovery took place when operator Fausto Capre dug with his car at a depth of about 10 meters in a quarry and noticed an object that caught his attention, before calling a team of paleontologists who confirmed the nature of the piece, which is about meter long and weighs 43 kilograms.

Although fossil finds are common in the area, it is notable for its antiquity, as it belongs to a time from which little is known about the giant species that lived on the continent, such as this armadillo, which weighs more than 1,000 kg. , 4 meters long and a shell about 5 centimeters thick, which makes it a kind of “living war tank”, as paleontologist José Luis Aguilar told Efe.

A time of huge animals

“Since this time, very little is known about many members of the South American fauna that have walked through these places, every time you find a fossil from the end of the Ensenada era, you always find that these animals have different adaptations (.. .) … you see that they are harsher, more corpulent, they have a different gigantism, a bigger gigantism ”, said Aguilar, the director of the San Pedro Paleontological Museum.

This time is considered the “peak of an evolutionary response” by which natural herbivores in South America increased in size to defend themselves against the arrival of new predators from North America, when both continents joined 3 years ago. and 4 million years.

“From North America came carnivores such as sword-toothed tigers, wild dogs, cats … a lot of carnivores that were not in South America, which began to prey on herbivorous animals, such as giant sloths (. ..). The evolutionary answer is that after a few hundred thousand years, these animals are starting to get bigger, as if to say, “I’m getting bigger so it’s harder for you to attack,” he added.

A natural trap

In the same area, several fossils of different animals were found in a small space, because in it there was a swamp that acted as a “natural trap” for animals.

“At the end of this Ensenadense era, the whole area was an old swamp, an old wetland, it was like a natural trap, big bugs came to eat attracted by pastures or drink water and found a very soft floor and arrived to sink and die in that swamp, as if it were a trap that had been hunting animals for hundreds or thousands of years “, he underlined.

This fossil was removed from the site by Aguilar and Julio Simonini, another paleontologist of the team, and now needs to be treated to remove the surrounding sediment layer, known as tosca, and hopes that once this process is complete, the tail, or flow tube, can be displayed in one of the museum’s rooms.

Visitors, who managed to re-enter the museum in just over a month after more than 10 months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic, will be able to see one of the oldest fossils in the region.

“From this special genre and from this moment of time, this end of Ensenadense, here in the area there are no pieces, the pieces that were found correspond to a date between 20 and 40 thousand years, much more modern”, Aguilar concluded.