Fishermen in Argentina’s Greater Buenos Aires region keep making an unusual catch: shells of prehistoric armadillo ancestors. In October of 2019, a group of fishermen found a mostly intact shell which has been dated to over 10,000 years old. And four years earlier, on Christmas Day of 2015, Jose Antonio Nievas found a shell in mud by a stream in his farm.
Both turned out to be glyptodonts’ shells. Glyptodonts were not a single species, but an animal genus containing seven known species, among them the ancestors of modern armadillos. Glyptodonts had large, heavy shells and armored tails which they could use as clubs. They emerged in South America no earlier than 35 million years ago, and went extinct around the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Whether or not their extinction was related to humans’ arrival on the continent around the same time… well, that’s still up for debate.
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