The nine-banded armadillo is an oddity to me. I know nothing about them other than what I've read. My encounters have been limited to a few minutes each, near dusk, in Florida, or perhaps poring over my first roadkill in amazement.
So what I'm going to give you here you could get about anywhere, but it's interesting to me. The armadillo is a collection of bizarre characteristics rolled into leathery armor. It's not just a possum in a can.
The armadillo family (Dasypodidae) finds its richest expression in South America, where it originated. They belong to the superorder Xenarthra, along with the anteaters and sloths. Paraguay has 11 species of armadillo. By the early Pleistocene, nine-banded armadillos had used the Isthmus of Panama to invade North America, where they range as far north as central Indiana and Nebraska, and east to Florida and South Carolina. I had no idea there were Hoosier armadillos. Nebraska? They must be more cold-tolerant than they look. My gosh. Whatever do they do in the winter, when there are no ants and termites and beetle grubs to eat? I read that they retreat underground to escape the cold, but they are unable to hibernate, and die in freezing temperatures. Soooo....what are they doing in the Great Plains? Expanding their range, and dying out each winter at its northern terminus? Scratching my head here.
Stay in Florida, little armadillo. Though I'm sure there are many who'd like to export you.
So this little animal in a can is puttering alongside the car and I'm staring at it as if it time traveled in that can because we have nothing like this in Ohio. It's an edentate, an insectivore. It gives birth to four IDENTICAL young, same sex, from a single egg that splits into four parts. So it'll have identical quadruplets, all boys or all girls.
Because of this, and the fact that armadillos can contract leprosy, they've attracted attention of lab researchers. When you have four identical twins to work with, you can do all kinds of experiments on the animals without worrying about your results varying because of genetic differences between them.
The perfect lab animal. Lucky armadillos!
They look like they're walking on tiptoe all the time, on their heavy clawed toes. They can dig very fast, and disappear almost before your eyes in nice loamy loose soil.
photo by Liam Thompson
Their armor is so beautiful. I kept wondering what an armadillo skeleton might look like--what's under all that? The armor is a combination of dermal bone and horn. Amazing. The bands remind me of those rubbery accordion-folded connectors between subway cars. The design of the animal is quite amazing. I was thrilled to find this photo of an armadillo skeleton!
My God! I mean, just start with the ribs--widened, laterally flattened--and that crest of vertebral processes along the spine! Do you need very strong intracostal muscles to be able to breathe under all that armor? I wonder... You can see the crests on the scapula where enormous digging muscles insert. Those massive forearm and thigh bones, the bizarre tilted pelvis and the insanely cool skull, which is pretty much exactly what the armadillo's head looks like (eyes seem to be an afterthought when you dig for things you can smell). It all makes me want to pick up the next armadillo roadkill I find and somehow get that skull--heck, the whole skellington. Little peglike teeth for crunching down ants and termites. And the way the shell sits over it all. What an inspired mount. When I look at this skeleton all I see is raw power, from the massive nature of the bones.
Apparently a frightened nine-banded armadillo can jump straight up 3-4 feet in the air. Which is probably an elegant escape/startle strategy when it's surprised, say, by a bear. And which, as anyone who's hit one knows, is bad when you are trying to straddle an armadillo on the highway.
A tremendous BONK! and it's dead. Do not straddle the armadillo.
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Imagine if these had walked up the Isthmus of Panama to central Indiana.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
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