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

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

The discovery occurred when operator Fausto Capre was digging with his machine about 10 meters deep in a quarry, and he observed an object that caught his eye, before calling a team of paleontologists who confirmed the nature of the piece. that is about a 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 when much of the data on the giant species that inhabited the continent is unknown, such as this armadillo, which is said to have a weight of more than 1,000 kilograms , 4 meters long and a shell about 5 centimeters thick, making it a kind of “live war tank,” as paleontologist José Luis Aguilar told Efe.

A time of gigantic animals

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

This time is considered to be the “culmination of an evolutionary response,” which allowed the natural herbivorous animals of South America to grow larger to defend themselves against the arrival of new predators from North America when both continents emerged between 3 and 4 million years ago. united.

“From North America came carnivores like saber-toothed tigers, wild dogs, felines … a lot of carnivores that weren’t in South America and they started hunting those herbivorous animals like giant sloths (…). The evolutionary answer is that after a few hundred thousand years these animals start to get bigger as if they were saying ‘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 smaller space, as it contained a swamp that acted as a “natural trap” for the animals.

“At the end of this Ensenadense era that whole area was an old swamp, an old swamp land, it was like a natural trap, the big insects came to eat attracted to the meadows or to drink water and they found a very soft floor and ended up sunk and died in that swamp, it’s like it was a trap that hunted animals for hundreds of years or thousands, ”he emphasized.

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

Visitors, who were able to reenter the museum for a little 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 particular genre, and as of this moment, this end of Ensenadense, here in the area there are no pieces, the pieces that have been found correspond to dating between 20 and 40 thousand years, much more modern,” Aguilar concluded.