Car-sized ancient mammal was an armadillo

Scientists said their genetic research confirmed that the creature, named Doedicurus, was part of an extinct lineage of gigantic armadillos. 

Doedicurus was a plant-eater that weighed about a ton and roamed the pampas and savannas of South America, vanishing about 10,000 years ago along with many other large Ice Age animals. They were able to place Doedicurus and the other glyptodonts into the armadillo family tree after studying small fragments of DNA extracted from bits of the creature’s carapace. They used a sophisticated technique to fish mitochondrial DNA out from a soup of environmental contaminants that had leached into the fossil over the eons. 

“With a length of more than three meters (10 feet) from head to tail, it certainly looks like a small car, like a Mini or Fiat 500,” evolutionary biologist Frederic Delsuc of France’s Université de Montpellier, one of the researchers, said. The oldest armadillo fossil, from Brazil, was around 58 million years old. 

Doedicurus resembles the dinosaur Ankylosaurus, which also was heavily armoured and wielded a club-like tail. They said the resemblance was an example of “convergent evolution” in which disparate organisms independently evolve similar features to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.