Once upon a meter in South America , when giant ground sloths andsaber - toothed catsroamed the nation , another visually salient creature was plodding around : the glyptodont . This dreaded , armadillo - alike animal weigh around as much as a tonne , and wielded a powerful , guild - forge , spiky tale . A new study published in the journalCurrent Biologyhas finally pinpointed where this unusual beast lies on the evolutionary Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree .
Based on fogy evidence , these lumbering , nonextant creatures first evolved during theEocene epoch , somewhere between 56 and 34 million old age ago . They had a tortoise - like physical structure armor , be of layered bony deposits within their skin ; although they were n’t capable to swallow their head for trade protection , they were deck with a bony jacket ofarmored skinon top of their skull .
This home was comprised of several genera , including theGlyptodon , which was roughly the size and mass of a Volkswagen Beetle . Although it was percipient that these herbivorous animals belonged to the superorderXenarthra , a group of mammals that include anteaters , tree tree sloth and armadillo , researchers were unsure of where they fit out in here – or exactly when they acquire .
This novel study , spearheaded by researchers at McMaster University in Canada and the National Center for Scientific Research in France , aim to definitively solve this enigma . They decided to look for the desoxyribonucleic acid of one of the bombastic glyptodonts , theDoedicurus , within its living congenator . This particular family penis , which weighed around 1.36 tonnes ( 1.5 tons ) , was one of the last to become extinct , mighty at the remnant of the last ice historic period 12,000 years ago .
A fossil of a Glyptodon asper , locate in the Natural History Museum of Vienna , Austria . Arent / Wikimedia Commons ; CC BY - SA 3.0
By comparing the deoxyribonucleic acid press out from aDoedicurusfossil bone to the DNA assemblage of every livingXenarthramember , the team was able-bodied to reconstruct its genetical history . As the researchers suspected , Doedicuruswasn’t just related to armadillo – it belonged to the same evolutionary group , making them bonafide , ancient , giant armadillo .
They were also able to date when the family first appeared . “ Glyptodonts in fact represent an extinct ancestry that likely originate about 35 million old age ago within the armadillo radiation , ” said Hendrik Poinar , a professor of physical anthropology at McMaster University in Canada and cobalt - generator of the study , in astatement .
This engagement corroborate with the best dodo evidence : The clay of the oldest glyptodont family member , theGlyptatelus , was antecedently estimated to be 36 - 38 million years of long time .
This sketch also disclose how dramatically the size of the glyptodonts changed over evolutionary fourth dimension . The last unwashed ancestor of the glyptodonts and the modern armadillo weigh in at around a measly six kilo ( 13.3 pounds ) . Some of the last surviving members weighed at least 2,000 kilogram ( 4,410 pounds ) , about as much as anIndian rhinoceros . This means that they experienced an increase in mass of about 333 percent until they became extinct .
It was clear that these animals had a particularly queer evolutionary history . If speedy climate change and human activity hadn’twiped them from the planet , who knows what off-the-wall , bombastic beasts these Brobdingnagian , herbivorous and ultimately heavy animate being would have continued to germinate into ?
