They discover in Argentina the tail of a giant armadillo of 700,000 years ago

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

The find occurred when the operator Faust Capre was digging with his machine about 10 meters deep in a quarry, and observed an object that caught his attention, in front of which he called a team of paleontologists which confirmed the nature of the piece, which is about a meter long and weighs 43 kilograms.

Although the fossil findings are common in the zone, this one emphasizes by its antiquity, to belong to a time of which many data are not known on the giant species that inhabited the continent, as it is the case of this armadillo, that it would weigh more than 1,000 kilograms, 4 meters long and an armor about 5 centimeters thick, which makes it a kind of “living war tank”, as paleontologist José Luis Aguilar told Efe.

An era of giant animals

“Of this period of time little is really known about many members of the South American fauna who walked through these places, every time you find a fossil of the late Ensenadense age you will always find that this animal has different adaptations (…) .. voices that are coarser, more corpulent, have a different gigantism, a bigger gigantism “, said Aguilar, director of the Paleontological Museum of Sant Pere.

This epoch is considered the “peak of an evolutionary response,” by which South America’s natural herbivorous animals increased in size to defend themselves from the arrival of new predators from North America when all two continents came together between 3 and 4 million years ago.

“From North America came carnivores like saber-toothed tigers, wild dogs, felines … a whole bunch of carnivores that weren’t in South America starting to prey on these herbivorous animals like the lazy giant (). .) The evolutionary answer is that after a few hundred thousand years these animals start to get bigger like saying ‘I’m getting bigger so it’s harder for you to attack’, ”he added.

A natural trap

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

“At the end of this Ensenadense age this whole area was an old swamp, an old wetland, it was like a natural trap, the big critters came to eat attracted to the pastures or drink water and found a very soft floor and finished sunk and dying in this swamp, it’s like it was a trap that was hunting animals for hundreds of years or thousands, ”he stressed.

This fossil was removed from the site by Aguilar and Julio Simonini, another of the team’s paleontologists, and will now have to be treated to remove the layer of sediment that surrounds it, known as pumice, and wait for it to finish. this process, the tail, or flow tube, can be exhibited in one of the museum rooms.

Visitors, who were able to re-enter the museum after 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.

“Of this particular genre, and of this moment in time, this end of the Ensenadense, here in the area there are no pieces, the pieces that have been found correspond to a dated between 20 and 40 thousand years, much more modern, ”Aguilar concludes.